I am thrilled and honored to be joining Collegium Helveticum, Institute for Advanced Study supported by ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, and the Zurich University of the Arts as a Senior Fellow!
While at the Collegium, I will work on a research project titled Caring for Naturecultures , which reconceptualizes the conservation of art and culture as a practice of care, and places it in dialogue with the preservation of natural environments. Centering on “conservation objects” as natureculture hybrids, the project frames care as an expanded and ethical engagement with more-than-human worlds. The term natureculture signals the mutual co-constitution and entanglement of nature and culture, challenging the Western dichotomy that separates human activity (culture) from the natural world.
Engaging with feminist philosophies and care ethics—which define care as “everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we may live in it as well as possible”—I interrogate the hierarchies, dependencies, and exclusions embedded in conventional understandings of care and conservation. In doing so, my project further unsettles long-standing binaries underpinning conservation discourse: nature/culture, subject/object, practice/theory, and tradition/innovation.
Caring for Naturecultures poses fundamental questions: What is the “thing” we preserve—how, why, and for whom? And what visions of futurity guide conservation and care for naturecultures in the face of impending environmental breakdown?
Drawing inspiration from Bernard Stiegler’s call to “think care-fully,” the project positions care as essential to sustaining life and cultivating coexistence with other beings. Crucially, it reimagines conservation as a critical, care-driven practice.
For more information, follow this link.