Sponsored by the Franklin Humanities Institute/Mellon Humanities Futures Initiative, Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke Campus Farm, and Environmental Arts and Humanities.

Please join us for this lunch conversation with Bruno Latour on his recent work regarding “critical zones” in the earth sciences. Bruno Latour is professor at Sciences Po, Paris, where he also directs the médialab and the SPEAP (Experimentation in Arts and Politics) program. The event will be introduced by Prof. Daniel Richter of Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, with a response from Prof. Latour to follow. Q&A will begin with faculty from the new Environmental Arts and Humanities initiative, then open up to the general audience. This event will follow a 2-day visit by Prof. Latour and a group of scholars and artists to the Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory, Prof. Richter’s NSF-funded research site in South Carolina. See a blog post on this interdisciplinary “road trip” here.

Recommended readings:

• Bruno Latour, “Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest,” from Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge: Harvard UP (1999).
• Bruno Latour, “Some advantages of the notion of "Critical Zone" for Geopolitics,” Procedia Earth and Planetary Science 10 (2014),3–6.
• Bruno Latour, “How to make sure Gaia is not a God of Totality?” Written for the Rio de Janeiro meeting The Thousand Names of Gaia, September 2014 
• Bruno Latour, Pablo Jensen, Tommaso Venturini, Sébastian Grauwin and Dominique Boullier, “The whole is always smaller than its parts: a digital test of Gabriel Tarde’s Monads,” British Journal of Sociology 63:4 (2012), 590-615.
• * Recommended * Daniel Richter & Sharon Billings, “‘One Physical System’: Tansley’s Ecosystem as Earth’s Critical Zone,” New Phytologist 206 (2015): 900–912