Organizer: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Type/Location: Virtual

Description:

This talk explores how the modern earth and environmental sciences were shaped by Indonesian intellectuals and knowledge traditions on the slopes of Javanese volcanoes. Bobbette will introduce the core principles of political geology as a method that builds on political ecology and social histories of science. He will also examine how the theory of plate tectonics was not a scientific “revolution” but was profoundly enabled by the spiritual geographies and political geology of central Java.

About the Speaker:

Adam Bobbette is a geographer and Lecturer at the University of Glasgow in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences. His current monograph, The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java, examines how Indonesian Islam shaped the modern understanding of the earth. His writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, N+1, and Cabinet Magazine and he is co-editor and contributor to Political Geology: Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life (2019) and New Earth Histories (2022). New Earth Histories tells the history of the environmental and earth sciences from a cosmopolitan, global perspective. He is currently working on a project about twentieth century spiritual movements, fossil fuel prospecting, and conceptions of self. He is co-founder of Kebun Lithos, a research centre on Mount Merapi volcano in central Java.He is co-founder of Kebun Lithos, a research centre on Mount Merapi volcano in central Java.

Registration:

To attend the event virtually, please register here.