Vienna Basin: An Anthropocene Process Landscape in Central Europe
Thursday, January 23, 2025
Online Event
11:30 am – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5
11:30 AM New York l 5:30 PM Vienna11:30 am – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Hub for the Politics of the Anthropocene (OHPA) presents a seminar with Benjamin Steininger, discussing the Vienna Basin and its oil and gas fields as a showcase for how to deal with Nature/Culture-History in modernity and Anthropocene. Observing the history of oil and gas exploration in the region, Steininger will trace at least four different versions of experience with petro-modernity and Anthropocene-agency (international capitalism, Nazi-war-economy, Soviet imperialism, social democratic-catholic petro-modernity). The talk argues that it takes this type of bottom up field work and a comparative 'petrocultures' or 'Anthropocene-comparision' as performed in the 'Atlas of Petromodernity' to interpret the planetary agency of the so called 'Anthropos'.
Benjamin Steininger is a historian of science and technology and a curator. He works as a postdoc at the Cluster of Excellence UniSysCat at TU-Berlin and at the MPI of Geoanthropology in Jena. His main Anthropocene research fields are industrial chemistry and petro-modernity. From 2012 to 2016 he led a participatory research and collection project on 100 years of oil and gas in the Vienna basin. His open access book with Alexander Klose, "Atlas der Petromoderne'", was published in German and Russian in 2020 and in 2024 in an enlarged American version with an introduction by Stephanie LeMenager.
For more information, call 845-758-6822.
Time: 11:30 am – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Location: Online Event
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