Humans and Other Living Beings EASA Network (HOLB)
FUTURE EVENTS
Workshop announcement and call for participants
Energy Anthropology Network – Environment and Anthropology Network – Humans and Other Living Beings
19-21 May, 2025 — Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy
How are humans and other living or nonliving beings, from frontline or vulnerable communities, experts and nation states to endangered and invasive species or extinct glaciers responding to the multifaceted environmental and ecological calamities facing our planet? How are these communities organizing the possibilities of survival, transformation, resistance, or flourishing? This workshop, organized by three EASA networks – Energy Anthropology, Humans and Other Living Beings, and EnviroAnt – invites proposals that explore the interconnectedness of energy systems and infrastructures, human and nonhuman agencies, and environmental dynamics. We invite contributions that engage with the entanglements of infrastructures, the metabolic flows they shape, and their impacts on both human and nonhuman lifeways in the context of the Anthropocene.
In addition to creative formats, the workshop will feature field visits offering a grounded exploration of Venice’s intricate energy flows and ecological dynamics. We will travel to places such as the barene, an endangered ecological system vital for protecting Venice from tides, and the MOSE, a system of mobile barriers designed to manage flooding in the city. These visits will examine the entanglements of power dynamics, non-human adaptations, and their long-term impacts on the lagoon’s metabolic balance. We also have an exciting list of confirmed participants: Anthropologists Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer (Rice University), whose work includes the design of the world’s first glacier memorial, will join the workshop to contribute their insights. Jamie Cross (University of Glasgow) will also join the workshop and lead a field session on humidity and mold in Venice.
While traditional papers are most welcome, we especially encourage proposals for sessions and activities that embrace experimentation and reflect the interconnected themes of the workshop. Below is a list of possible formats to inspire your proposals:
- Roundtables: suggest a topic for a roundtable discussion featuring 2-5 speakers.
- Visual or Multimedia Presentations: photo essays, videos, digital exhibits showcasing research and reflections on material flows, energy, or metabolic processes.
- Performances: Live or recorded performances that engage with the themes of energy, infrastructures, metabolisms, multispecies relations. This could be dance, spoken word, soundscapes.
- Storytelling: fictional narratives, ethnographic storytelling, poetry.
- Flash presentations: 5-min 5-slides presentation to share flash insights, provocations, questions and spark discussion on a theme related to metabolisms.
- Ideation Labs: propose a lab for a small number of participants to collaborate and tackle a practical challenge related to energy, climate change, and/or infrastructure.
- Teaching Pods: share insights, questions, challenges, and ideas about teaching related to energy, environmental, and multispecies anthropology.
- Works in progress: submit your works in progress for constructive feedback. This could include a book chapter, dissertation chapter, article draft, or anything else that would benefit from supportive peer feedback outside of traditional journal reviews.
- Sustainability Practices: share ideas, practices, solutions for cultivating wellbeing and sustainability at individual, household, and/or community scales.
- Research Presentations: Of course more ‘traditional’ papers are welcome, this could be a 15-min paper or an excerpt of a longer paper.
- Place-Based Activities: Exploring features of Venice’s urban and aquatic environment, such as silence, flooding, malleable spaces, and the potential to occupy public space creatively.
This is not an exhaustive list: Please feel free to suggest other activities or contributions.
For all of these, please provide a 250-word abstract/summary of your proposed contribution, including title, name of author(s)/performers/facilitators, institutional affiliation, and email address. Please also include any technical equipment or materials that you would need for your proposed contribution.
Limited funds will be available to support the attendance of early career researchers and scholars from the Global South. A portion of the funds are set aside for supporting sustainable travel choices.
Please send all contributions to enviroant.network(at)gmail.com by Friday the 21st of February.
Successful applicants will be notified by the end of February.
Feel free to reach out to any of the networks with questions.
Organizing committee
Valentina Bonifacio, Umberto Cao, Cormac Cleary, Pauline Destree, Raghnild Freng Dale, Zeynep Oguz, Elena Stecca, Amelia Veitch.
PAST EVENTS
Wild collaborations: on communal relations beyond the human, HOLB network lightning panel at EASA2022 conference, 'Transformation, Hope and the Commons' Belfast
Animate Mobilities: Troubling Social, Ecological and Biological Boundaries, HOLB network panel at EASA2020 conference, 'New anthropological horizons in and beyond Europe' Lisbon
Arts of Coexistence: Care and Survival in the Sixth Extinction
Workshop by HOLB, co-organised by the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH), University of Oslo
Tøyen Hovedgård, Botanical Garden, Oslo, Norway
2-3 May 2019
Conveners Ursula Münster (University of Oslo), Sara Asu Schroer (FU Berlin/ University of Aberdeen), and Hugo Reinert (University of Oslo)
Read the programme 
and the report
Liveability in a Time of Ecological Destruction, HOLB network panel at EASA2018 conference, ‘Staying Moving, Settling’ Stockholm
Living well together: considering connections of health, wellbeing and work in the lives of humans and other living beings, HOLB network panel at EASA2016 conference ‘Anthropological Legacies and Human Futures’, Milan
The inaugural meeting of the Living Beings Network was held at the EASA2016 Milan.
