Jakob von Uexküll Lectures
Jakob von Uexküll Lectures are organised by the Department of Semiotics of the University of Tartu, and Jakob von Uexküll Centre.
Nils Lindahl Elliot - Observing Wildlife in Tropical Forests: A Geosemeiotic Approach, November 7, 2018.
How do tourists observe wildlife in tropical forests? Why would anyone engage in such a practice – or perhaps more precisely, in such practices? And what exactly is entailed by ‘wildlife observation’?
In this lecture Nils Lindahl Elliot will address these questions by way of what he describes as a geosemeiotic approach – a transdisciplinary perspective that articulates semeiotic, ecological, geographic, and sociological theories in order to explain how it is that tourists may perceive, conceive and interpret the fauna and flora in what are popularly described as ‘rainforests’. The spelling of semiotics with an extra ‘e’ reflects the investigation’s debt to Charles Sanders Peirce, who spelled the term in this manner, and whose semeiotic theory, phenomenology and ideal-realist philosophy provide a point of departure for the inquiry.
The presentation is divided into two parts. The first will offer an overview of the research, starting from an ethnographic investigation that engaged with the observational practices of tourists visiting the internationally-renowned biological reserve on Barro Colorado Island, Panama. The second part will focus on the semeiotic-phenomenological dimensions of the practices, with an account of the manner in which Peirce can be used to articulate three general modes of wildlife observation: immediate, dynamical, and mediate.
Nils Lindahl Elliot is a writer, teacher, and researcher based in Bristol, UK. His research investigates popular pedagogies of nature, with a special interest in the mediazation of such pedagogies. He is the author of Mediating Nature (Routledge, 2006), and of the forthcoming Observing Wildlife in Tropical Forests, a two-volume study that presents the results of research supported by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI).
The recording of the lecture can be viewed here: https://www.uttv.ee/naita?id=27761
Wendy Wheeler – The Carrying: Material Frames and Immaterial Meanings, April 30, 2014.
See the lecture at UTTV.
Wendy Wheeler is a Professor of English Literature and Cultural Inquiry at the London Metropolitan University, and a Visiting Professor in the Environmental Humanities and the Arts at the University of Oregon in the USA and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia.
She is the author of books A New Modernity? Change in Science, Literature and Politics (1999), The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (2006).
She has been an Editor (jointly with Jeremy Gilbert) of New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics.
She edited special issues for this journal, on ecocriticism, and animal studies, and also a special issue for Green Letters on ecophenomenology and the sacred practices.
She has edited the Living book on Biosemiotics.
Currently, she is completing a new book The Flame and Its Shadow: Reflections on Nature and Culture from a Biosemiotic Perspective.