Rowan Deer, PhD - Academic Talk Videos

This is a talk prepared for EMERGENCE/Y, the 2021 ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) conference.
Fungi generate and demand subterranean thinking: thinking beyond the visible, thinking that makes connections between things previously supposed to be separate or individual. This talk traces an extended subterranean metaphor that likens (or lichenizes) human language to fungal networks, showing how thinking fungally can transform how we conceive of the strange, underground life of language and our entanglements in it.

This is a talk prepared for 'Humanities on the Brink: Energy, Environment, Emergency', a Nearly Carbon Neutral (NCN) online symposium sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE).
Examining the perils and possibilities of quickness in the Anthropocene, I consider how the current extinction crisis might be thought in relation to the future and the past, to speed and acceleration, to irreversibility and urgency, and to the evolution of human language and consciousness. These ideas are elaborated through engagement with J.G. Ballard’s novel The Drowned World and the October 2018 IPCC report.
Wildlife photography in the video is by conservation biologist and photographer Adam Roberts.

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