Dear colleagues,

please be warmly invited to a seminar with Nicolás Cuvi, Professor at the Latin American Faculty for Social Sciences (FLACSO) at Quito, Ecuador, and currently a research fellow at the Centre for Anthropocene History at KTH. Nicolás will present his research on Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Amazonia:

Friday, October 23, 10:15–12.00

Centre for Anthropocene History, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH

Teknikringen 74 D, 114 28 Stockholm

Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Amazonia

Before the sixteenth century, the Amazon was a densely inhabited, highly diverse biocultural biome, shaped by millennia of intricate human and non-human entanglements. This seminar explores the long-term history of this socio-ecological system through three phases. First, it examines the ”Making” of the Amazon, highlighting the deep historical co-production of its biocultural landscapes. Second, it dissects the systematic “Unmaking” of the region, tracing the extractivist vectors that have operated since European contact, by summarising examples of the centuries of ecosystemic and epistemic dispossession, from early imperial extraction to contemporary agribusiness. In this Unmaking, the Amazon has been subjected to a relentless process of dual colonial emptying to construct a tameable terra nullius: a semiotic depletion that erased local ontologies, languages, and knowledge, and a material depletion driven by demographic collapse and the metabolic reorganization of the territory. Finally, the talk explores the “Remaking” of the biome by emphasising the persistent resistances, agencies, and adaptation strategies of Indigenous and local communities (and of studies on the Amazon) that highlight possible pathways to a resilient future.

Nicolás Cuvi is an environmental historian based in Quito, Ecuador, where he is a Senior Research Professor at the Latin American Faculty for Social Sciences (FLACSO) at Quito, Ecuador. His work spans the environmental humanities broadly: environmental history, history of science, urban ecology, and environmental ethics, in the context of the tropical Andes, the Amazon and Latin America. Nicolás has also served as Lead Author and Coordinating Lead Author in Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sixth and seventh assessment cycles.

Welcome!

Sabine

Dr. Sabine Höhler

Professor of Science and Technology Studies

Head of Department of Philosophy and History

KTH Royal Institute of Technology

School of Architecture and the Built Environment

Department of Philosophy and History

Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment

Teknikringen 74 D

SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden

Fon: +46 8 790 87 41

Email: sabine.hoehler@abe.kth.se