Dr Joshua Wodak (Western Sydney University)
June 24, 2025 | 17.45 – 19.15 | MESH, EAI Library, Wienand Haus, Weyertal 59, 3rd floor
A rupture of life on Earth is currently unfolding. Lyrical, playful, and deadly serious, Joshua Wodak’s Petrified: Living During a Rupture of Life on Earth takes the reader on a journey deep into the nature of our home, to give us the tools to learn how, in the middle of that rupture, to comport ourselves with honesty, clarity, culpability and intelligence.
This talk will provide an overview of the book, following its March 2025 publication by De Gruyter, through a detailed case study of current and proposed conservation for endangered Chelonia mydas sea turtles on Raine Island, a small coral cay on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.
Chelonia mydas and Raine Island are presented as synecdoche for conservation across diverse species across the world, because turtles are among the most endangered of all reptiles, and Raine Island is the largest and most important rookery in the world for this species. This is not, however, a book about conservation per se. Rather, the book reframes any-and-all conservation in the context of the radical asymmetry and radical contingency of life to the vicissitudes of the cosmos. Therein, Petrified contemplates the unthinkable questions that our current situation demands we ask, and perhaps even try to answer.
Dr Joshua Wodak is a researcher, writer, and artist whose work explores what it means to not only be alive during the current upheaval (climate crisis, Anthropocene, Sixth Extinction Event et. al.), but to be alive to upheaval itself. That is: how to live on an inherently unstable Earth, and in an inherently catastrophic cosmos. He is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University. His first book is Petrified: Living During a Rupture of Life on Earth, published in the Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies series by Heidelberg University (De Gruyter, 2025).