A three-part workshop on the stories we tell about the end of the world, the worlds already ending, and how we might love one another amidst the rubble.
Across three sessions, Kameron Lai and Luca Martin will guide us through these questions, considering the overlapping crises unfolding at different speeds, in different places and among different forms of life. Through collective discussion, creative exercises and experimental mapping, we'll examine the assumptions that shape our understanding of ecological crisis, and consider what other ways of thinking, relating and responding might be available to us.
No prior knowledge of philosophy, ecology or critical theory is required. Curiosity, disagreement and an appetite for difficult questions are very welcome.
In-person tickets are fully catered for food and drink. Both ticket types will receive access to digital spaces throughout the workshop series full of ongoing discussion, alongside all materials discussed available to them for their use.
November 10th, 17th and 24th | Tuesdays, 6.30 to 8.30pm. Hosted in Brunswick (full address upon ticket purchase) | In-Person and Zoom tickets available.
Across film, literature, religious prophecy, political movements and environmental discourse, the apocalypse has taken innumerable forms.
The natural: flood, fire, plague, famine, extinction. The human-made: nuclear annihilation, technological catastrophe, ecological collapse, war. The spiritual or speculative: divine judgement, cosmic reckoning, alien invasion, the rupture of reality itself. Whether sudden or gradual, the end is generally imagined as something approaching us, a future event in which the familiar world comes apart.
But whose world are we talking about, and who gets to decide when its ending begins?
For some, apocalypse remains a distant possibility, something to prevent, prepare for or survive. For others, the destruction of a world is neither hypothetical nor new. Colonialism, displacement, extraction and ecological devastation have already brought innumerable worlds to an end, often without the dramatic punctuation we associate with catastrophe.
So, when we imagine collapse as a singular, universal event, whose experiences are excluded from the telling, and what does that exclusion prevent us from recognising? These questions also ask us to reconsider what we mean by human, and why human experience has so often been treated as the measure of everything else.
session one | human?
human / non-human / extinction / difference / ecology / exclusion / the more-than-human
What exactly do we mean when we speak about humanity?
Our first session begins by examining the distinction between human and non-human life, and the philosophical, political and cultural histories through which that distinction has been produced. We'll consider how particular ideas of humanity shape our understanding of collapse and extinction, and how the familiar narratives of apocalypse tend to privilege certain lives, experiences and forms of existence over others.
Drawing on posthuman and critical philosophies, we'll question who appears in our accounts of catastrophe, who remains absent, and how these absences influence what we understand to be worth preserving.
Through discussion and creative collaborative exercises, we'll also begin turning our attention toward the non-human beings with whom we share our environments, asking what it might mean to recognise forms of experience, vulnerability and existence that do not necessarily resemble our own.
session two | not here, not yet.
time / place / progress / narrative / uneven catastrophe / crisis / representation
Why does the apocalypse so often arrive in the future?
In our second session, we'll examine how contemporary literature, cinema and other cultural representations construct the time and place of collapse. What assumptions about history, progress and normality are contained in the idea that there was once an intact world from which we have fallen, or might someday fall?
We'll look at the different temporalities and geographies of environmental crisis, paying attention to the ways ecological catastrophe intersects with political, social and historical conditions. An event experienced by one community as an approaching threat may already constitute the everyday reality of another; what appears sudden from one perspective may have been unfolding for generations elsewhere.
Through this, we'll begin considering how different accounts of crisis might coexist, overlap or contradict one another, and what these differences demand of our understanding of the present.
session three | cartographies.
cartography / entanglement / relation / imagination / collective life / responsibility / possible futures
If apocalypse does not happen everywhere at once, or mean the same thing to everyone, how might we begin to represent it differently?
Our final session brings together the questions developed throughout the series through an experiment in collective mapping. We'll investigate the many relationships, histories, environments and forms of life through which ecological catastrophe is experienced.
In bringing the series to a close, we'll return to the possibility of imagining futures that neither deny the severity of ecological destruction nor reduce the present to a rehearsal for inevitable extinction. There may just be ways to live responsibly among worlds already altered, damaged or disappearing, and the kinds of thought, attention and collective practice we commit to may in fact allow us to learn to love amidst the rubble.
format
This three-part series combines guided discussion, philosophical and cultural analysis, and collaborative creative exercises. Each session will introduce a set of questions and ideas, with space for participants to contribute their own experiences, interpretations and disagreements.
The intention is to develop a richer vocabulary for thinking about its many forms, and to experiment with ways of understanding the world beyond the categories and narratives we have become accustomed to.
No prior knowledge of philosophy, ecology or critical theory is required. Curiosity, disagreement and an appetite for difficult questions are very welcome.
who is this for?
Anyone.
Readers, writers, artists, environmentalists, organisers, speculative fiction enthusiasts, philosophically curious people, and anyone interested in ecology, extinction, posthumanism, science fiction, film, political imagination, the relationship between humans and other forms of life.
Also for those who are exhausted by the familiar choice between technological salvation and catastrophic despair, and suspect there might be more interesting things to think about than whether we're all doomed.
your hosts
Kameron Lai (they/them)
Kam lives and works on unceded Wurundjeri Land. Their research explores contemporary science fiction, the ethics of imagining collective futures, and ecological imagination. Outside of research, Kam is involved in teaching and organising, with occasional emergency karaoke sessions.
Work hard, play hard, stream Popstar.
Luca Martin (he/him)
Luca is a Bundjalung, Kamilaroi and Muruwari man living in Narrm/Melbourne. His research brings together post-structuralist philosophy, ecology and anarchism, with a particular interest in how these fields inform our understanding of political and ecological life.
Outside of study, he works with left-wing collectives providing free community education and teaching anarchist theory and practice.
