Welcome to the Panel on Planetary Thinking

Our scientific manager Liza Bauer was awarded the special prize of this year’s BUND research prize for research on sustainable development on November 25th for her dissertation “Livestock in the Laboratory of Literature”. The jury particularly highlighted her efforts to revise the prevailing narrative of legitimizing industrial animal use (not only for food, but also as organ storage and object of genetic engineering), as well as her methodology of analytically deconstructing everyday myths through literary analyses. We extend our warmest congratulations to her.

In collaboration with the Giessen Graduate Center for Natural Sciences and Psychology (GGN) and the working group “Climatology, Climate Dynamics and Climate Change,” the Panel cordially invite you to a hybrid event just before christmas:

Prof. Nicola Di Cosmo, Luce Foundation Professor in East Asian Studies at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, will give a lecture on „Historical method and paleoclimate research in the time of the Anthropocene: present and future perspectives". 

The event will take place Wednesday, December 20 at 4:15 pm at Multifunktionsraum 1, Alter Steinbacher Weg 38 and will be streamed online through BigBlueButton.

For more information on the lecture and participation options, please visit the GGN’s event page, as well as our own event page. Registrations and inquiries can also be sent to panel@planet.uni-giessen.de.

The Panel is delighted to announce that we will once again host our ‘Planetary Spaces’ fellow and climate change activist Adenike Titilope Oladosu from 1 March 2024 to 28 February 2025, for the entirety of her fellowship awarded by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Berlin.

Oladosu’s research project will focus on the topic ‘Protection of Lake Chad as a peace and conflict resolution pathway: achieving protection through mapping and data generation to inform policymakers’. During this fellowship, Oladosu will expand on her research which she developed as a fellow at the Panel in summer 2023 documenting the diminishing size of Lake Chad due to climate change. The research will track how shrinking of Lake Chad has paved way for conflict in the region to double since 2009. The project involves setting up a data-based observation unit for conflicts in the Lake Chad region using Google Earth Engine (GEE). It emphasizes the need for a restoration agenda for Lake Chad, which could significantly contribute to the peace and security of the population.

We extend our best wishes to Oladosu for another successful scientific endeavor to raise awareness on the shrinking of Lake Chad. 

The Panel warmly invites everyone to the upcoming exhibition vibrating bodies of water by Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano (Planetary Spaces winter fellow) on 10 November at 18:00 at Neuer Kunstverein Giessen.

The audiovisual installation  is an invitation to the visitors to experience water as a planetary space through deep listening, offering a melodic and imaginative path to heal our relationship with the deep sea. The exhibition is complementary to the three-day “wet workshop” conducted by Pacheco Bejarano on the theme “Environmental Identities at the Ocean Floor”. A detailed report of the event can be found here.

During the winter term, the course "Planetary Thinking. An interdisciplinary introduction" takes place: As part of the orientation year in the Bachelor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, this module provides students with in-depth insights into core areas of planetary thinking: the lecture series highlights perspectives from experts who are working on current and innovative research approaches in the field: from philosophical questions about our relationship to the Earth and its more-than-human inhabitants, to practical discussions of current planetary topics such as artificial intelligence, climate change or questions of astrophysics. In the accompanying seminar, these perspectives are then reworked and deepened in cooperation with the speakers on the basis of further texts. The aim of the module is to convey basic concepts of planetary thinking and their fields of application.

The course was opened on October 31 by the well-known physicist and science journalist Ranga Yogeshwar with a lecture on "Emil's World - A Planet in Transition", which focused on reflections on the future of his grandson, who was born in 2020. He showed how this world will be shaped by far-reaching planetary changes, such as technical innovations, climate change and shifts in social interaction, and emphasized the need to rethink the way we live.

 The Panel on Planetary Thinking is organizing the President’s lecture series on the topic of ‘Planetary Thinking: An Interdisciplinary Introduction’ this winter semester 2023/2024. The lecture series will be held in german. It is open to all interested parties, will take place in the main auditorium of the university building and can be followed online via a livestream. It furthermore is part of the teaching course "Planetary Thinking. An interdisciplinary introduction" which is part of the orientation year in the Bachelor of Liberal Arts and Sciences study program.

The opening event will take place on Tuesday, October 31, 2023 at 7:00 p.m.: The renowned physicist and science journalist Ranga Yogeshwar will reflect on the world of the future as a result of current profound global changes in his lecture “Emil’s World - A Planet in Transition”.

Further information on the event series can be found in a press release from JLU.

On September 21, 2023, the Panel on Planetary Thinking in collaboration with the Planetary research program  at the Berggruen Institute, a think tank based in Los Angeles launched the ‘Planetary Portal’ on planetaryportal.org. The website shows the institutes, indigenous movements and prominent individuals that are working on or within a planetary framework. These include university research centers, independent research institutes, NGOs, and other organizations that approach policy, politics, and philosophy through a planetary lens. More information on the project can be found here.

Together with this year’s fellow in the Planetary Scholars & Artists in Residence Program, we cordially invite you to the Planetary Spaces: Wet Workshop.

Throughout the workshop, Pacheco will intra-act with a river, a lake, a pond, a pool, and an aquarium, through somatic reading and listening exercises and ask: how does water alter our conventional understanding of media, time, and space?

The workshop will take place from 02.-04.11.2023. Registration to the entire workshop is possible till 26^th October, 2023 via panel 

A complementary exhibition to the workshop will be held at Neuer Kunstverein Giessen on 10 November. A detailed schedule of the workshop can be found here.

The Panel on Planetary Thinking presents the next hybrid instalment of our Planetary Lecture Series: On November 3 2023, Prof. Dr. Klement Tockner, Director General of the Senckenberg Society for Nature Research, gave a lecture on the topic “Water as an Engineered Planetary Space”. 

Our Fellow Juan Pablo Pacheco initiated a discussion on the political and planetary dimensions of water surfaces as shaped and endangered places. We would like to thank our diverse audience of workshop participants, JLU students and non-university citizens of Giessen for their active participation and a stimulating reception after the event.

Further information is available here.

The event took place Friday, November 3 at 6 pm at Hermann-Levi-Saal at Kunsthalle Gießen and was streamed online.

On September 28^th, the Panel visited the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt to view the exhibition “PLASTIC WORLD” (22.6.-1.10.2023). The exhibition showed the history of plastics in the visual arts – from being celebrated as the eternal material, symbolizing progress and modernism to being the ultimate threat to the environment. The works of around 50 international artists were exhibited in the forms of installations, assemblages and documentaries.

Among others, the German artist Otto Piene’s installation; new edition of Anemones: An Air Aquarium (1976/2023) fascinated us with its huge inflatable sea anemones and other sea creatures. The artwork made it possible to experience the underwater worlds but at the same time was poignant to point to the pollution of the oceans by plastic. The installation in particular resonated heavily with our current Planetary Spaces fellow Juan Pablo Pacheco’s project on “Environmental Identities at the Ocean Floor”.

The excursion came to a delightful ending with an evening stroll by the Main River as our Director, Claus Leggewie gave the team an insightful guide to the city of Frankfurt and its history.

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".