Description
Terrestrial Conditions: The Politics of Health in a Planetary Age. An Interdisciplinary Symposium."What might it take to reimagine human and nonhuman ‘health’ on an earth at loose ends with itself? In 2015, the Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on planetary health published its report, “Safeguarding human health in the Anthropocene epoch” (Whitmee et al., 2015). Juxtaposing anthropogenic climate change against putative gains in global health, the Commission argued that the same modern drivers that enabled human health to “flourish” now “risk substantial health effects from the degradation of nature’s life support systems in the future”. The notion of “planetary health” was initially proposed to provide a framework for tackling this situation, which the Commission ascribed to a triple failure of “imagination,” “knowledge,” and “implementation”. By integrating environmental and planetary conditions in a systemic understanding of global health, it proposed to govern continued improvement in health outcomes while rendering human and nonhuman health environmentally sustainable.
A decade later, this symposium seeks to push the triple challenge of planetary health beyond its original conception, advancing new approaches to make critical interventions into the politics of health on a damaged planet. Amidst the swelling planetary polycrisis that marks the present — in the form of record temperatures, extreme weather events, global health emergencies and the proliferation of plastic waste produced in response to them, as well as the radical disruptions to the neocolonial infrastructure underpinning global health research and cooperation— this workshop takes as its starting point the radically destabilising effects of planetary upheavals and sets out to explore their social and political implications on our ways of understanding and imagining of more-than-human health. After all, the planetary is irreducible to the global. Beckoning into realities that far precede human histories and far exceed modern horizons, the planetary situates us in the throes of forces that upend dreams of progress and undermine fantasies of control (Savransky & Lundy, 2022).
Terrestrial Conditions invites encounters with what it means to take ‘the planetary condition’ seriously, and to rethink health in relation to it. "
| Period | 31 Jul 2025 → 1 Aug 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Workshop |
| Organiser | Department of Social & Policy Sciences |
| Location | Bath, UK United KingdomShow on map |
Keywords
- High Impact Research