Public lecture by Professor Andrew Woolford: Genocide with Nature

Public lecture by Professor Andrew Woolford, Department of Sociology, University of Manitoba.

This presentation introduces a comparative examination of how human groups form in partnership with more-than-human actors. Drawing on research on four genocides – those in Armenia, Cambodia, Canada, and Rwanda – it looks at how the groups targeted for destruction at these four sites previously shaped their collective existence in concert with key more -thanhuman counterparts (i.e., land, plants, waters, and animals). Genocide in each case involved more than the attempted destruction of human lives and relationships – groups were assaulted as symbiogenetic entities, disrupting patterns of human and more-than-human co-constitution.

Examples from each site are drawn upon to specifically illustrate how childhood, fami lial, and cultural processes of collective becoming were interrupted when genocidal perpetrators sought to disrupt group relationships with the natural world.

Everyone is welcome, registration is not needed