When Everything Changes
Ideas for a world undergoing constant change
Profound changes in sensitivity are taking place as the planet’s temperature continues to rise. The anthropocentric view, the comprehension of non-human intelligence and the scale on which we measure our actions are all changing. The conception of genders is changing. The social and geopolitical map, and the ways of reaching diagnoses and solutions are also changing. We are witnessing a global scenario plagued by seismic tremors of different kinds where the speed of change has become the only constant. We are pleased to present the videos of the Kosmopolis 2017 sessions that inspired the publication When Everything Changes.
Timothy Morton
Change Is Changing
The ecological crisis we are facing is also a crisis of our sense of what things are. Not only are we witnessing colossal, disturbing change to parts of our world that we treated for too long as a static, neutral background; but also we are seeing how one person’s change for the worse ...
Stefano Mancuso
The Roots of the Intelligence of Plants
Plants behave in curiously intelligent ways: they fight against predators, maximise opportunities for food, and have more senses than we can imagine. How should our ideas about the plant world and its function in the fabric of life change? Italian neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso presents some ...
Carl Safina
Can We Know What Animals Think and Feel?
Consciousness, self-awareness, empathy, non-verbal communication, imitation, teaching, grief. Many animals think and feel a lot like people do; after all, people are animals. Carl Safina shows that in some surprising ways non-human minds aren’t really too different from ours. They know ...
Hope Jahren
Be as a Tree Planted by the Waters: The Magic of Roots, Leaves, and Everything in Between
Trees are the oldest, biggest, and most successful creatures in the world. Using energy from the sun, and carbon from the air, they have thrived on land for more than four hundred million years. Hear about the amazing and unique methods that plants around us use to establish, grow, flourish, ...
Kim Stanley Robinson and Ian Watson
The New Reality: Climate Fiction
‘Climate Fiction’, set in the near future, is the realistic fiction of our time, and Kim Stanley Robinson is its leading practitioner. Veteran SF author Ian Watson will discuss with Kim Stanley Robinson his career committed constructively to surveying how our human race may survive ...
Orna Donath, María Llopis, Brigitte Vasallo and Bel Olid
The Family Is Dead. Long Live the Family
Access to cheap and effective contraception has been one of the driving forces of feminism: released from the obligation of reproducing women could, finally, decide what they wanted to do with their lives. However, how do those of them who have decided to have children actually live motherhood? ...
Sílvia Bel and Jordi Blesa Montoliu
Blind Readings
Does any female poetry exist beyond that written by women? Or is it just good or bad literature that exists? Is it necessary to continue treating women as a collective to whom visibility may be given in thematic cycles? Does a female canon exist? Or has it been imposed upon us by cultural and ideological questions? Blind Readings is a poetic game that aims to raise the visibility of gender prejudices in literature, a recital that challenges the audience to guess whether the text has been written by a man or a woman.
Lynne Segal
The Scandal of Ageing
Perhaps old women need to begin ageing scandalously, to beat back the scandals of ageing. As Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies Lynne Segal illustrates in her book Out of Time: The Pleasure & Perils of Ageing, across times and places older women, although usually devoid of ...
Javier Celaya
The Book to Come
In a world of driverless cars and trains, smart vacuum cleaners and fridges, sensors that track sleep and exercise, can we suppose that the book will continue to be the same as ever? The boom in artificial intelligence and big data augur a radical transformation in the way in which we consume all types of cultural contents. At this moment of changes and uncertainties, we will be performing an exercise in foresight and venturing to predict the future of the book.