29.10.2024
[Colloquium:] Stirring up Marseille: Towards an Urban Anthropology of Ocean Sediments
Thursday, 31 October 2024, 16.15 - 18.00 CET; Room 101, Institut für Soziologie (Wilhelmstr. 36, 72074 Tübingen) and via Zoom
On Thursday, 31 October, 16.15 - 18.00 CET, Dr. Lukas Ley (MPI, Halle) will give a talk on “Stirring up Marseille: Towards an Urban Anthropology of Ocean Sediments”. This talk will be held in room 101 at the Insitut für Soziologie (Wilhelmstraße 36, 72074 Tübingen) and can be followed online via Zoom. This event is the first session of the G-TURN colloquium "Urbanities in a Global Perspective: Crises, Change, and Continuity" of the winter term 2024/25.
Abstract:
The talk considers dredging operations in the Bay of Marseille to develop an anthropological approach to ocean sediments. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in France and using various styles of representation, it attempts an atmospheric dive into the sandy and muddy layers of the Mediterranean seafloor. Asking how the existence of sediments is historically produced and how sedimentary deposits and human design form Anthropocene “patches” (Tsing et al. 2024), "Stirring up Marseille" is an act of provoking new understandings of the urban seafloor. It invites you to consider the "feral" nature of sediments.
Bio:
Lukas Ley is an environmental and urban anthropologist working at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, where he leads a DFG-funded Emmy Noether research group on the infrastructural lives of sand in the Indian Ocean World. His research is broadly concerned with urban temporalities and material environments. Current research projects investigate the role of sand in protecting coastal commons and driving dispossession in Denpasar, Indonesia, and the afterlives of concrete in Marseille, France. Ley's first book, “Building on Borrowed Time: Rising Seas and Failing Infrastructure in Semarang” published by University of Minnesota Press, was awarded the Social Science Prize by the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies.