Seminar (CareNet): "Rot and Renewal: Crafting Ecological Futures in the Face of Decay"

Program

Summary

Imagine the future to come, and it’s hard to shake feelings of gloom and dread: a sense of things as somehow rotten, that mood of loss so hard to absorb. Rot is always vexing, and the temptation to turn away from its complications is real. In doing so, however, we lose sight of a resource essential to building a more livable future. This talk sketches the outlines of a new book project on the value of facing the reality of decay: both its difficulty, and its promise. In the natural world, decay is the underside of growth and the root of future life, as fallen leaves, fungi, and other quiet forces show. Communities the world over are engaging such possibility, devising new ways to live with things as they come apart, taking them as means to build ecological futures of social and environmental regeneration. Pay close attention to how urban naturalists, waste-obsessed artists, degrowth activists and many others work with the afterlife of decaying forms, and you can begin to imagine what a future more in tune with the truth of rot could look like. There are four key dimensions to such efforts, I argue: historical, cultural, aesthetic, and political, each a different way of coming back to pervasive forms of waste and decay as radical means of renewal. The book will pursue these dimensions in relation to four cities in the global North and South – Baltimore, Madurai, Accra, and Barcelona – each of which embodies unique trajectories of ruin and repair, loss and renewal. Taken together, these places reveal new possibilities for regenerative development in the space of collective life and culture.

Anand Pandian

Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His books include A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times, and Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life and How to Take Them Down, forthcoming in 2025. He serves as President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and as a curator of the Ecological Design Collective, a community for radical ecological imagination and collaborative practice. He lives with his family in Baltimore, where he is currently working on a new book project on decay, waste, and the crafting of ecological futures.