Webinar: “Human and non-human animals in the jungle, the river, culture and climate change.”

Webinar on Ecocritical Literature and Environmental Humanities
Wednesday, July 25th
2:00 pm (GTM-3)

Rationale

This is the second webinar on Environmental Humanities, the topic of SARAS latest public conference: “Environmental Humanities for the 21st Century”. On this occasion, the online seminar is entitled “Human and non-human animals in the jungle, the river, culture and climate change.” A century ago, writer Horacio Quiroga who was settled in Misiones Jungle (Argentina), published his Jungle Tales (“Cuentos de la selva” in Spanish), a fundamental work for children and adults of the spanish-speaking world, and the River Plate region in particular.

From this context, we will reflect on a series of triggering questions such as:

  • What is the role of a consciousness about animals, not as inferior or human servants, but in the redefinition of the human condition that Critical Theory is developing since the end of last century?
  • How much do they contribute to displace an anthropocentric paradigm of culture and science to a biocentric one?
  • Who owns water? How to denaturalize the private appropriation of the planetary commons?
  • What does the mythification of the Garden of Eden, the Promised Land, the pastoral world of the Golden Age respond to?
  • Do forests, rivers, beaches, landscapes have right to legal representation?
  • Can they be subjects of law?
  • Do the dystopian cities from the cinema and literature foresee an unavoidable apocalypse or can they contribute to a discussion that may activate the path to an utopian but realizable future?

The presentation will be delivered by Francisco Bustamante (Professor of Literary Theory at Instituto de Profesores Artigas -Teachers Training Institute- and Latin-American Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Sciences of Education, University of the Republic of Uruguay) whose focus of interest is on the representations of nature and the links between humans and the non-human animals in latin-american narrative with a human-rights perspective, and specifically, in topics related to oceans, rivers and coasts.

Date: Thursday, July 25 2018
Time: 2pm (GMT-3). Please check your local time depending on location by clicking here.
This activity is free of charge but requires enrolment by completing the online form available here.
Access will be available from any device with an internet connection.
Please note that this seminar will be delivered in Spanish.
Organized by SARAS Institute.

About the presenter

Francisco Bustamente is a professor of Latin-American Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Sciences of Education, University of the Republic (Uruguay) and professor of Literary Theory at Instituto de Profesores Artigas (Teachers Training Institute, Uruguay). He holds a PhD and a MA from the University of Florida (Gainesville, FL). His research is focused on the representation of nature and the links between humans and the non-human animals in latin-american narrative with a human-rights perspective. At present, his focus of interest is on topics related to oceans, rivers and coasts. Some of his publications include “Uruguay never more: a report on the violation of Human Rights (1972-1985)”, in which he acted as a writer and coordinator; and “Human Rights in the classroom reflections and didactic experiences for mid-level teaching”, in which he acted as a co-author.