2019-2020 / Sustainable Humanity: Social, Political, and Ecological Considerations

Continuing our tradition of the Distinguished Lecturer Series, this year we have a stellar line up speakers throughout the year. Our theme for this years’ talks is Sustainable Humanity: Social, Political, and Ecological Considerations. We have invited Anthropologists to take into consideration if our present ways of life are sustainable? What must change to preserve human life, the viability of the ecosystem,the survival of cultures and social systems? Concerned by the failures of world political elites to address these hazards, the Anthropology Section of the New York Academy of Sciences is devoting its 2019-2020 academic program to the topic of “human sustainability.”

Anthropology is uniquely positioned to address human responses to such stresses, with its focus on the cultural past and present, on human biology and language,as well as its concern for practice. We ask how anthropologists are innovating and adapting in the ways they study these changes-seeking new kinds of field sites, new methods. We are asking our field for new approaches to old questions about humans,non-humans,and environments. Sustainability as a concern or set of practices entails the conjoining of different temporalities – what new research is engaging with understanding connections between present, past and future possibilities?