Concrete Walls, Porous Boundaries. Migrants in Environmental History

Online lecture by Professor Marco Armiero, Institute for the History of Science, Autonomous University of Barcelona. 

The time when walls were torn apart is over. Everywhere the Global North is eager to build some kind of walls that can keep "the others" -- whoever they might be -- out. Actually, paraphrasing Rebecca Solnit's brilliant argument, we could say that it is the wall that makes the "others" and the "us". As migrants are continuously sabotaging borders with their practices, radical scholars also need to trespass disciplinary borders and disobey mainstream narratives. In this talk, I will discuss the opportunities that research on migration and the environment opens to a radical transformation of our academic practices. 

Professor Marco Armiero is an environmental historian, and author of numerous articles and books on the topics of environmental justice, migrations and the environment, nationalism and nature. Professor Armiero is Icrea Research Professor at the Institute for the History of Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is also the President of the European Society for Environmental History and a former Director of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

The lecture continues the theme of the interdisciplinary symposium "Bordering nature: Reimagining borders against the climate of crisis”, that was held 27-28 September at the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu campus. The event has been supported by the BOMOCULT research community and the Joensuu University Foundation. 

For additional information, please contact the organiser by email at olga.cielemecka@uef.fi.