Colloquia

Start: 18:15
GW2 B3009
Language: German

Dr. Katherine Sammler
Marine Political Ecology Lead, Helmholtz-Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity Oldenburg

Sea level rise has destructive material impacts on coastal communities and low-lying nations. While it is largely perceived and experienced via these impacts, the level of the sea is less often thought about as a political surface. The boundary where land and sea intersect is determined by the ocean’s height, manifesting materially as a realm of coastal features and produced politically as baselines. Defined through international treaties, baselines are the low-water line upon which national boundaries are traced. Yet, this line between adjoining mediums of land and sea is much more physically blurred and dynamic than represented politically and legally. The difficulties of delimiting a coastline, a phenomenon referred to as the Coastline Paradox, means the measurement of a coastline is dependent on the ruler used, an entanglement of instrument and measurement. As rising sea levels encroach on physical coastlines, they are also impacting legal baselines, shifting national terrestrial and maritime borders inland posing existential dilemmas to island and low-lying nations. This talk considers baselines as a political technology, the calculative apparatus that enacts cuts to refashion lively ocean worlds into divisible spaces and objects. It examines how the concept of sea level was constructed scientifically and enrolled in the legal demarcation of territorial borders based on a land/sea binary that is in direct opposition to many coastal peoples and First Nations, while also being eroded by rising sea levels in a climatically changing world.

Dr. Katherine Sammler is trained as a geographer, with a background in atmospheric science and physics. She is the Focus Group Lead in Marine Political Ecology at the Helmholtz-Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) with the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and University of Oldenburg in Germany. She conducts research at the intersection of science and politics in the realm of oceans, atmospheres, and outer space. In all areas, her work considers the role of knowledge, law, and power in defining global commons, access, and environmental justice. She has recently published on astronomy and space infrastructure in relation to settler colonial observation and occupation as well as the lived physics of Earth’s magnetosphere.

Start: 18:15
GW2 B3009
Language: German

Discussants:

Prof. Dr. Silja Klepp
UNESCO professorship for integrated marine sciences, University of Kiel, Founder of the EnJustNetwork

Prof. Dr. Michael Flitner
Chair of artec Sustainability Research Center, University of Bremen

Dr. Jonas Hein
Senior Researcher am German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS) Bonn, Founder of the EnJustNetwork

Facilitation and introduction: Dr. Johannes Herbeck & Dr. Stefanie Baasch (artec)

Start: 12:15
Online

Prof. Mari Niva
Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Sciences (HELSUS), University of Helsinki

Food production and consumption are major contributors to climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation. In recent years, there has been increasing debate about the need for a sustainability transition in the whole food system. In the realm of food consumption, it is well-established that in Western affluent countries diets should change to include more plant-based and less animal-based foods. Accustomed patterns and practices of eating are increasingly being questioned in public discourse, policies are developed to encourage consumers to eat in more sustainable ways, and plant-based alternatives to meat and dairy products are entering and establishing their position on the market. However, established routines, patterns and practices do not change easily, and the transition is slow and involves a range of tensions.

In this presentation, I will examine these tensions from a practice-theoretical perspective, looking into how everyday activities take shape as part of social practices and related understandings and meanings, material infrastructures, routinized and normalized modes of action, as well as ethical, affective and other commitments and engagements. I will present findings from recent studies highlighting both changes and persistence in practices of food and eating, discuss how these vary in different social groups, and reflect on how such variations may be taken into account in practice-theoretical analyses on food, eating, and sustainability.

Start: 12:15
Online

Simon Hilpert
artec Sustainability Research Center & FB4 Production Engineering, University of Bremen