Information
Welcome to out next SOILS Reading Group. On March 22, 15:00-16:15 CET. We are delighted that Professor Andrew Mathews will be joining us as we discuss selected chapters of his book Trees are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Shape Landscapes (2022) More specifically, we will delve into the Introduction, Chapter 1, Interlude I and Chapter 2. See details below. Readings will also be circulated via the SOILS e-mail listserve.
Zoom-link: https://uio.zoom.us/j/62927195511?pwd=MjQ5RVB6ekhtcVlUNkZGMDQycVViZz09
Readings
- Mathews, Andrew. 2022. "Introduction". In Mathews, Andrew. Trees are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Shape Landscapes. Yale University Press. pp. 1-12.
- Mathews, Andrew. 2022. "ONE: Sensing the Invisible: Plant Form and Landscape Transformation". In Mathews, Andrew. Trees are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Shape Landscapes. Yale University Press. pp. 13-32.
- Mathews, Andrew. 2022. "INTERLUDE: Plant Morphology Leads to Geomorphology". In Mathews, Andrew. Trees are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Shape Landscapes. Yale University Press. pp. 33-41.
- Mathews, Andrew. 2022. "TWO: Plant Morphologies to Landscape Structure". In Mathews, Andrew. Trees are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Shape Landscapes. Yale University Press. pp. 42-72.
About the Presenter
Professor Andrew Mathews, University of California, Santa Cruz is a leading scholar in environmental anthropology with a long-standing interest in historical ecology, more specifically the historical relations between trees, soils, terraces, drainage systems and the shifting human impact and shaping of these. Trained in forestry as well as anthropology, he is an influential field researcher, refining practices of ‘arts-of noticing’ through multimodal techniques such as drawing and sketching. His most recent book, "Trees Are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Create Landscapes", (Yale, 2022), investigates how people in central Italy make sense of social and environmental change by caring for the morphologies of trees and landscapes. In Italy, people have been shaping soils, terraces, drainage systems, and trees for several thousand years. Because Mediterranean ecosystems have evolved to cope with dramatically variable climate, powerful disturbances, and intense human modification, they are good places to learn how climate change is experienced and acted upon in a landscape that is deeply anthropogenic. An earlier book, "Instituting Nature: Authority, Expertise and Power in Mexican Forests, 1926-2001", (MIT Press, 2011) focused on the history and culture of state forestry institutions and of indigenous forest communities in the state of Oaxaca, and combined theories of state-making with science and technology studies to argue that the production and management of ignorance are as important as knowledge to the assertion of state power.
Mathews holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Anthropology from the Yale School of Forestry/Yale Anthropology department (2004), a Masters in Forestry from Oxford University (1996), and a BSc. in Physics and Philosophy from the University of Leeds (1991).