Very unfortunately, this event had to be cancelled. We will try to reschedule the presentation and announce it accordingly.
Sara Asu Schroer (University of Oslo)
3 June 2025 | 12.00 – 1.00 pm | GSSC, room 3.03
(Classen-Kappelmann-Str. 24, 3rd floor, 50931 Cologne)
In this presentation Sara Asu Schroer shares work in progress and introduces her new line of research into the social and material manifestations of drought in European landscapes. Recent multi-year droughts have led to severe and unequally distributed socio-environmental disruptions across Europe, the Earth’s fastest warming continent. Much more than short-term ‘crisis-events’ droughts pose long-term, multi-faceted cultural, political, and conceptual challenges to society that remain poorly understood. What does it mean to live with droughts in European landscapes – landscapes that have long been dominated by human imaginaries of economic progress, materialising, for instance, in large-scale hydrological infrastructure, industrial agriculture and monocultural forestry? How are droughts locally manifested and what are their cross-reginal implications? Integrating insights from the geosciences and the environmental humanities into a multi-sited anthropological approach, her new project aims to study droughts as ‘creeping phenomena’ that manifest unevenly and on different social, material and spatio-temporal scales. By sketching some of the project’s main line of inquiry she is interested to discuss how social and cultural analysis may best address the relational constitution of environmental phenomena.
Sara Asu Schroer is an anthropologist based at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her research engages with theoretical debates on learning and enskilment, environmental perception, affect and atmospheres, more-than-human sociality, as well as with cross-disciplinary conversations on wildlife conservation, and co-existence in anthropogenic landscapes. In her ERC funded project DROUGHT she will be opening a new line of research on the layered social, cultural, political and material relationships in and through which droughts manifest in changing European landscapes.