Lesley Green
<p>How might humanists, social scientists, and natural scientists do “research that matters and matters politically” in the Anthropocene? In these two episodes, Lesley Green invites us to inhabit the diverse ecologies, violent colonial histories, neoliberal logics, and possible futurities from within South Africa. Green discusses teaching and her on-the-ground work with graduate students; theoretical engagements with post/decolonial and feminist scholars from Aimé Cesaire to Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway; ongoing collaborations with chemists, biologists, and geologists in Cape Town; and the urgent need for a critical paradigm shift that emphasizes the “social” rather than the calculable in scientific practices. Green focuses on the “relation,” arguing that studies of climate change cannot be disconnected from histories of capitalism and colonialism, and the interactions of living/nonliving ecologies.</p> <p>Green is an interdisciplinary theorist and activist based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She teaches in the department of Anthropology and directs the Environmental Humanities South, an initiative that combines science and technology studies, postcolonial and feminist theory, and biogeochemical approaches to effect policy interventions in the face of urgent environmental crises in South Africa today.</p>
Authors: Elaine Gan
Contributors: Lesley Green
Creative Director: Wanda Acosta
Composer & Audio Editor: Josh Allen
Audio Engineer: Joseph Hazan
Sonic Ethnographer: Ernst Karel
Media Researcher: Hannah Tardie
Multispecies Worldbuilding Lab
Part of: Multispecies Worldbuilding Podcast