Thursday, January 30, 2025 12:30pm to 2:00pm
About this Event
Fifth Ave at Bigelow, Pittsburgh, 15213
Hosted by the Humanities Center and visiting fellow, Lindsey french, Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Maine, with an introduction from Delanie Jenkins. This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer.
What does it mean to listen to another species? What kinds of methods can we develop for expanded practices of listening? How does our listening change when the message is not intended for us? If we consider the atmosphere as a multispecies commons, we can engage multiple senses—such as smelling, hearing, inhaling, and more—to gain insights into our environments and our roles within them. Research on plant signaling, for instance, shows that plants emit and respond to Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) as messages to nearby plants and insects. Considering human-induced emissions as airborne signals helps us perceive ourselves within a shared atmosphere of multispecies signaling. Embodied, multisensory experiences, like listening and smelling, are crucial for developing awareness of the atmosphere, especially during global climate change. Olfactory art, for example, engages critical questions about climate and air quality, fostering discourse related to the atmospheric commons. Sensorial practices of expanded listening focus less on models of urgent solutions, and more on developing the slow and receptive work of paying attention to and establishing relationships with the environment itself, and its many, multispecies inhabitants.
Precirculated material for this colloquium will be available here about two weeks prior and up to the event.
Please let us know if you require an accommodation in order to participate in this event. Accommodations may include live captioning, ASL interpreters, and/or captioned media and accessible documents from recorded events. At least 5 days in advance is recommended.