MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | HOPE AND HOPELESSNESS

Hopes of killing: the cultural politics of eradication

OCTOBER 3 @ 6 P.M. | Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

In a time of mass species extinctions, where species are 'going extinct' at an unprecedented rate, the word extinction and the phrase 'going extinct' seem ill-equipped to account for both the level of catastrophe but also the cultural politics that surround extinction events. Rather than showing how species 'go extinct' (as if they take themselves there), I will discuss how mobilising the rhetoric of extinction can abolish a sense of agency (human and non-human), and how it obscures the cultural politics of eradication that forms the terrain on which extinctions are pronounced. Instead, a cultural politics of eradication draws attention to the beliefs and practices that have to be in place in order for a species to rendered eradicable. In this talk, I will outline what a cultural politics of eradication looks like.