Welcome to the Panel on Planetary Thinking

Our scientific manager Liza Bauer was invited speaker at the SWITCH conference at University of Witten/Herdecke (UW/H) on September 14th and 15th. In her lecture, she introduced about 200 students, pupils, scientists, and entrepreneurs to planetary thinking as a framework. The conference program combined impulses from artists and experts with various workshop formats on topics such as health and climate, understanding nature, or economy in planetary responsibility. For example, it was discussed how human-animal relationships can be rethought. You can find a more detailed report on the conference here, further information can be found on the conference website.

Not only since the recently published General Update of Planetary Boundaries or the Forever Pollution Project, the chemical group of PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), so-called ‘forever chemicals’ and components of clothing, paint, cleaning agents, or packaging, has been controversial. In connection with these debates, we discussed the film ‘Dark Waters’ (2019, Haynes) at Kinocenter Gießen on Tuesday, September 26th.

The chemical company DuPont is world-famous for its brand name ‘Teflon’, among other things. In 1998, a hundred cows suddenly died near a Teflon production facility in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Lawyer Robert Bilott takes on the case and goes to court against DuPont. The cinematic staging of the case was put into context by political scientist and co-initiator of the panel Claus Leggewie during our expert discussion, which led to in-depth discussions surrounding chances and pitfalls of environmental regulations and how to impement them in a legal framework.

The event series "Planetary CineScience" is organized in cooperation with Kinocenter Gießen.  For further information, please visit our website. The next installment will take place November 28, 2023 at 7:00 pm, where we will be screening and discussing Mad Max: Fury Road.

On Tuesday, Sept. 19, we held a Planetary Colloquium on "The Sun. A Discovery".

In-depth discussions between speakers and participants enabled an enriching exchange across disciplinary boundaries that impressively demonstrated the importance of a methodically broad approach to studying fundamental natural phenomena such as the sun. To take the sun seriously as an epistemic object that has both societal and physical effects, multidimensional perspectives are required.

More detailed information about the contributions can be found here.

The Panel is pleased to invite everyone to our upcoming exhibition in cooperation with Kunsthalle Gießen. "Unstable Planetary Spaces" will be displayed July 6th 2023 to July 11th 2023. From the shrinking of the mega-lake Chad due to climate change to the irradiated Fukushima exclusion zone caused by the nuclear fallout in Japan 2011, Unstable Planetary Spaces explores how artists and activists are dealing with some of the most challenging durational disasters. More information can be found on our event page and a press release of the JLU. A detailed report of the exhibition can be found here.

Panel member Bente Castro-Campos wrote an insightful article on an excursion we did last year to the Rosbach Forest: Investigating the Moral Nuances of Nature: A Multisensory Exploration through the Anthropoogenic Urban Woodland" reflects upon an interdisciplinary experience tracing "the moral and ethical dilemmas of environmental (in)justice and resource use in the Anthropocene".

As a result of this workshop, the Planetary Forest Sculpture was created.

Castro-Campos included the artwork in her teaching: when she and her students visited the sculpture at the end of June 2023, the weeds had taken over the artwork. Inspired by the book "The Mushroom at the End of the World" by Lowenhaupt-Tsing" that she read with students this semester, the students who visited the artwork said that the weeds will continue to grow without human intervention, as Lowenhaupt-Tsing also explains with the concept of Satoyama. 

The artwork is open to the public and can be visited by anyone curious about the way how planetary material originating from an ecological disturbance area can slowly reclaim an autonomous form of existence inside a human-made world like the botanical garden. 

On June 19th, our trip to Museum Sinclair-Haus to see the exhibition “Clouds: From Gerhard Richter to the Cloud Art” (19.3.-13.08.2023) took place. The exhibition fitted perfectly with the theme of the semester "Planetary Spaces" and the projects of our fellows Adenike Oladosu and Jason Waite.

We were particularly fascinated by how scientific methods and technology were incorporated into contemporary artistic explorations of clouds - both in the depiction of man-made clouds caused by pollution and natural variants of clouds.

We pondered the day's impulses for a long time while gazing at the overcast sky on the way home.

The link to the exhibition can be found here.

Our summer fellow Adenike Oladosu was invited as an expert to talk at the Bonn Climate Conference. Further information on the event can be found here and in an interview with German Tagesschau.

We are looking back on an immensely enjoyable event on June 5th, in the course of which we presented our fellows, their projects, and our other activities to Angela Dorn-Ranke, the Hessian minister for science and art. The event took place in the new palm house at Giessen’s Botanical gardens and ran under the headline “JLU & Sustainability: Keeping the Bigger Picture in Sight”. Together with the JLU’s office for sustainability, we were able to present a wide range of activities to about 90 colleagues from the JLU and beyond. When the morning came to a close, Frederic Hanusch, Claus Leggewie, and Liza Bauer had the great pleasure of taking Ms Dorn-Ranke on a brief walk-through to the Planetary Forest sculpture – the participatory artwork initiated by our first round of fellows. We cordially thank the minister for the ongoing support in making transdisciplinary research a reality at the JLU! A more detailed recapitulation of the event can be found in a press release of the JLU.

Our interim scientific managing director Liza Bauer was a guest at the vegan brunch at Stoppel's open farm where she spoke about the topic "How animals shape our lives and what open farms tell us about it."
In her talk on the relationship between humans and farm animals using the example of the farm, she compared the global effects of violent structures in factory farming with the influence of animals on the farm and other animals living with humans.

On June 16th, the Planetary Lecture Vol. IV took place on the topic of "Planetary Intersectionality: Feminism, Impermanence and the Radicalness of Simplicity" at the Salon of the Gießen City Theater. Our guest was Minna Salami (THE NEW INSTITUTE, Hamburg) - our fellow Adenike Oladosu acted as a respondent and opened the group discussion.

Salongespräche X Planetary Lecture - thus ran the title under which the collaborative event between the Panel and the city theater was held. Minna Salami called on the approximately 21 participants to rethink: Through slowness, mindfulness, and experiencing with all senses, we can learn much about the non-human world that withdraws from quantifiable research methods.

The local newspaper, Gießener Anzeiger, reported on the even in the article "Aufruf zur feministischen Perspektive".