Activities and Events
We run a regular seminar programme, featuring a combination of external and internal speakers, along with activities and events, sometimes partnered with external organisations.
Get in touch if you would like to suggest a collaboration.
2025
Speaker: Dr Jasmin Packer
Affiliation: University of Adelaide, Australia
Speaker: Dr Mostafa Gamal
Affiliation: Queen Margaret University
Title: The anthropo-not-seen: colonialism and the ‘geographies of the present’
Abstract: What I propose to talk about are the ways in which the concept of the Anthropocene which occupies a privileged analytical/theoretical position in discourses of sustainability often hides and sets aside colonial histories that still shape the “geographies of the present”.
In this provocation, I wish to foreground the link between ecology and coloniality. I will engage with the concept of the Anthropo-not-seen (de la Cadena, 2019) in order to attend to “the material forms…ruins of the empire take when we turn to shattered peoples and polluted places” (Stoler, 2013, p.13). Central to this is the argument that the Anthropocene sets aside the ways in which ecological degradation is lived differentially both in time and space. I explore this with reference to a disused mine and 2 deserted settlements in the south east of Morocco. I argue that to understand the “geographies of the present” , as a manifestation of how landscape is produced, destroyed and what is “created by its destruction” , we need to engage with the imperial anthropos’s unseen “constitutive will to destruction”.
Speaker: Mandy Haggith
Event type: Book reading and poetry
Event title: The Lost Elms: A Love Letter to Our Vanished Trees – and the Fight to Save Them
Location: The Stewart Room
Time: 12-1:30pm
- The Independent’s non-fiction book of the month for July
- Book of the Day, The Guardian, 23rd July
- The Scotsman, first of their list of ten books about the outdoors to read this summer
- Books from Scotland, a Q&A with Mandy Haggith about the book
- A review in Caught by the River, written by Kirsteen Bell
Speaker: Dr Tim Stojanovic
Affiliation: School of Geography and Sustainable Development, University of St Andrews
Title: Applying Paul Ricoeur’s Narrative Theory: Trends in Environmental Sustainability of UK Seas 1992-2022
Speaker: Dr Rehema White
Affiliation: School of Geography and Sustainable Development, University of St Andrews
Title: Critical conversations on education for sustainable development
Our recent book is now open access.
A chance to gather and decide on priorities for the year ahead.
Speaker: Dr Sanna Elina Ala-Mantila
Affiliation: University of Helsinki
Title: Using carbon footprints – challenges of scale and accuracy
Speaker: Dr Sanna Elina Ala-Mantila
Affiliation: University of Helsinki
Title: Sustainable urban planning
Ben Ong and Rehema White on Art and Sustainability
Sustainability in the Curriculum workshop
Facilitated discussion of ongoing projects and ideas
