All seminars are aimed primarily at graduate students undertaking or considering the Critical Theory Emphasis, but all are welcome.
Spring2025 CTE Mini Seminar, Presenting
Ömür Harmanşah
University of Illinois Chicago
Director of the School of Art & Art History
Associate Professor of Art History
"Landscapes of the Anthropocene:
The Environmental Politics of Fieldwork and Heritage"
When: May 5th-7th
Time: 4-6pm
Location: Humanities Gateway 1010
5/5, Session One: The Political Ecology of Anthropocene Landscapes
5/6, Session Two: Fieldwork as Creative Practice
5/7, Session Three: Salvage and Heritage in Precarious Times
This is an in-person event - Please RSVP Here if you intend on attending the CTE Mini-Seminar.
*Please note that UCI students attending this Mini-Seminar for credit are required to attend all three seminar sessions. Sign-ins will be required each session.
"Landscapes of the Anthropocene: The Environmental Politics of Fieldwork and Heritage"
Professor Ömür Harmanşah
University of Illinois Chicago
Abstract
The seminars investigate how the current regime of climate change and the global ecological crisis in the age of the Anthropocene impact the way we write histories of landscapes and places, the way we conduct fieldwork, and engage with communities of heritage. In the early 2000s, environmental scientists proposed a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene, highlighting the scale of human impact on earth’s geology and ecosystems. What are the responsibilities of academics in the humanities and social sciences in a changing climate and ecological crises? Historians point to the implications of our moment of global anxiety on how we write history, urging us to reconsider historical fundamentals such as the nature/culture divide, prioritization of human over geological time, and questions of agency, freedom, and progress.
Engaging with the methodological challenges to the study of landscapes brought by the onset of the Anthropocene and what Bruno Latour has called “the new climate regime”, the seminars advocate for a return to on-the-ground fieldwork in archaeological and historical landscapes. Presenting my field experiences from two different projects in south central Turkey and the Hunza Valley in the northern areas of Pakistan, I will frame a fresh concept of fieldwork as affective and often performative form of engagement with the world and its local communities. In the seminar, we will build the concepts of place and landscape as a unit of human experience of the world and their documentation through creative fieldwork.
In the third and final seminar, we will draw attention to the destruction of cultural heritage both in contexts of war and terrorism, e.g. ISIS’s acts of heritage violence, and as disposable landscapes sacrificed to late capitalist development, e.g. mines or hydroelectric dams. Archaeologists have long preferred to work on Holocene landscapes and projected their nostalgic ecologies into the deep past. I contrast the romantism of Holocene heritage landscapes with the dystopic Anthropocene landscapes which are heavily altered by industrial modernity, usually avoided by archaeologists at the expense of more “pristine” sites. The threatened heritage and disposable landscapes are only studied under salvage archaeology. In this seminar, I argue that in the context of the late capitalist management of the countryside, all archaeological field practice in the Middle East has virtually become a salvage operation. The seminar will therefore investigate the ethical, political, and methodological dilemmas of landscape research in the region through debates on political ecology and new materialism. It proposes a politically engaged, ethically responsible, and posthuman history of landscapes.
Bio
Ömür Harmanşah is Director of the School of Art & Art History and Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His current research focuses on the history of landscapes in the Middle East and the politics of ecology, climate justice, place, and cultural heritage in the age of the Anthropocene. As an archaeologist and an architectural historian of ancient Western Asia, Harmansah specializes in the art, architecture, and material culture of Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia during the Bronze and Iron Ages. He is the author of two monographs Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East (Cambridge, 2013), and Place, Memory, and Healing: An Archaeology of Anatolian Rock Monuments (Routledge, 2015). He is also a co-author in Thames & Hudson’s recent global art history textbook The History of Art: A Global View (2021). In the field, he has directed Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project, an archaeological survey, ecology, and landscape history project in Turkey's Konya province since 2010 in collaboration with Dr. Peri Johnson. He served as the Lead-PI for Political Ecology as Practice: A Regional Approach to the Anthropocene (2017-2019), funded by the Humanities Without Walls Consortium with a grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Harmanşah is Vice President for Cultural Heritage for the Archaeological Institute of America, and Associate Editor for the Cambridge University Press journal Archaeological Dialogues.
Please message criticaltheory@uci.edu for any questions.