1) Prof. Michael Fisch

Our escalating global ecological crisis demands a re-diagnosis of the nature of power. Political ecology has offered a forceful critique of power through analyses of the co-constitutive relationships between economic, social, and cultural forces and the environment. Within this critique, the notion of biopolitics has served as an important analytical tool, highlighting the work of political rationality for the management of human life toward surplus labor, and the intellectual (and financial) collaboration between the life sciences and capital. In recent years, a number of scholarly works have further elaborated the concept of biopolitics in light of new definitions of life driven by advances in biotechnology; and other thinkers have begun to question the adequacy of the concept in the face of a global political system that seems both unwilling and unable to prevent ongoing ecological collapse under climate change. My talk builds on these arguments to identify an ecological theory of life and a corresponding system of power that is aimed at managing ecological interstices. I argue that this theory of life and system of power are most explicitly manifest in efforts to reboot ecological systems in the aftermath of natural disasters, as well as in attempts to redesign ecological systems in anticipation of future catastrophes.