Listening to the archive: A cross-cultural analysis of European wildlife sound archives, 1950 to the present

New project ‘Listening to the archive: A cross-cultural analysis of European wildlife sound archives, 1950 to the present’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. In this project, I collaborate with the British geographer Dr. Jonathan Prior (Cardiff University) to study the history of nature sound recording through the two largest archives in Europe, the British Library’s Wildlife and Environmental Sounds collection in London, and the Animal Sound Archive in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.

Re-scaling Global Health. Human Health and Multispecies Cohabitation on an Urban Planet

Presentation of the new collaborative research project Re-scaling Global Health. Human Health and Multispecies Cohabitation on an Urban Planet together with Jörg Stollmann, Jamie-Scott Baxter and Laura Kemmer at the Phyllis Lambert International Seminar, Université de Montréal. The project is funded by the Berlin University Alliance and will officially start in 2022. The project further includes Dorothee Brantz, Jörg Niewöhner, Uli Beisel, Sandra Junglen, Tanja Straka and Ignacio Farías. The project investigates urban human-animal-environment relationships and the multiple links between health, biodiversity, and environmental pollution.

Noise in the Anthropocene

Online Seminar May 17 & 18

Organized by Leonardo Cardoso (Department of Performance Studies, Texas A&M University), with co-organizer Ana Širović (Department of Marine Biology, Texas A&M University Galveston).

The concept of Anthropocene, popularized in 2000 by Paul Crutzen (Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 1995), has been an influential framework to understand environmental issues as symptoms of a new geological epoch – a period fundamentally marked by the material presence of human beings on Earth. Commonly mentioned issues related to the Anthropocene include changes in the water cycle, acidification of oceans, and extreme meteorological phenomena. Noise, on the other hand, is only rarely mentioned. In a 2011 report, the World Health Organization/Europe announced that the disease burden caused by environmental noise was second only to air pollution. According to the study, at least one million healthy life years were lost every year from traffic-related noise in western Europe. But noise pollution affects other living organisms as well: the dramatic increase in transportation networks and natural resource extraction makes noise a problem of planetary proportions.This virtual seminar brings together artists and scholars from diverse academic fields to highlight how noise can provide a dynamic, polyphonic, and multi-species understanding of our environment.

I’ll be presenting on Ecological cadences: the city as a sonic refugium.

Abandoned Infrastructures and Nonhuman Life

New contribution to the Society & Space forum “Ecologizing Infrastructure: Infrastructural Ecologies” edited by Lisa Krieg, Maan Barua, Josh Fisher.

“Abandoned infrastructures become unusual zones and experimental fields for studying the adaptability of nonhuman life and speculating about future ecologies in future cities.” See the whole contribution here.

 

New book out now: The Botanical City

This unique collection of essays explores the botanical dimensions of urban space, ranging from scientific efforts to understand the distinctive dynamics of urban flora to the way spontaneous vegetation has inspired artists and writers. The essays explore developments in Berlin, London, Lahore, Tokyo, and many other cities, as well as more philosophical reflections on the meaning of urban nature under the putative shift to the Anthropocene. Edited by Matthew Gandy and Sandra Jasper.

For more info check out the jovis website.

 

Natura Urbana: The Brachen of Berlin / Online film screening + Urban ecology panel discussion

FRIDAY APRIL 17th – SUNDAY APRIL 19th

ONLINE FILM SCREENING & PANEL DISCUSSION CO-HOSTED BY UCLA BOTANICAL GARDEN AND TOUCH

Enjoy a personal screening of the film, followed by a recorded panel discussion exploring themes around urban ecology, landscape architecture, history, city planning, language, and more. This event is free, but you must RSVP to receive links to the content. These will be emailed out by Friday April 17th, so that you may enjoy at any time during the weekend in your own time zone.

Panelists will include:

• Jules Cooch Manager of Public Outreach & Education at the UCLA Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden (Discussion Moderator)

• Sandra Jasper
Film Co-author and Junior Professor of Geography + Gender in Human-Environment-Systems at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

• Kat Superfisky
Urban Ecologist at City of Los Angeles + Founder of Grown in LA

• Evan Meyer
Executive Director at Theodore Payne Foundation + Street Plants author

• Lila Higgins
Senior Manager of Community Science at Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County + Co-founder of City Nature Challenge + Author of Wild LA

Free for all, just sign up here!

 

Assistant Professor at Humboldt Uni

From January 2020, Sandra will be joining the Geography Department at Humboldt University Berlin as Assistant Professor.

Dr Sandra Jasper

Dr Sandra Jasper is a geographer by training, whose work spans the fields of cultural, urban, and environmental geography. Her current work involves four themes: cities as experimental fields (how urban wastelands and other marginal spaces serve as cultural and scientific laboratories); sonic geographies (how sound constituted, sensed, and governed); feminist materialisms (how nature, life, and the human subject are conceptualised in geography and beyond); geographies of global/planetary health (how urban environmental change affects human and other-than-human health).

She is Assistant Professor of Geography and Gender at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Sandra worked for four years at the University of Cambridge before joining Humboldt-Universität in 2020. In 2015, she obtained her PhD in Geography from University College London. Her doctoral research was based at and funded by the UCL Urban Laboratory.