Losing Ground: Planetary Instability and a Life Tenacious

Join us for an instalment of the Weather, Climate, and Health Research Theme's online talk series.

One of the most affectively dislocating features of the planetary upheavals that make ever sprawling environmental disasters amplify the effects of ongoing and uneven conditions of poverty, violence, and dispossession, is not their urgency, but their permanence: the fact that there is no foreseeable future in which redemption would prevail. Planetary instability is now an irremediable condition. We might. with Emile Cioran, say that to live is to lose ground. What would it take to refuse the cruel hope for a redemptive future without seeking consolation in the despair that such forlorn hope precipitates? At a time when everyone is extorted to save the world (or be damned), in this talk I explore the stakes of a kind of pessimism intent not on making things better but on living tenaciously while one can.

About the speaker

Martin Savransky is currently Distinguished Research Fellow (2025-2029) at the Institute for Language, Literature and Anthropology (CSIC), where he leads the “Liveable Futures” Project (ATR2024-154966). Working across philosophy, the social sciences, and the environmental humanities, Martin’s writings explore the unruly politics of liveability amidst permanent planetary instability. He is the author of Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Politics of the Pluriverse (Duke University Press, 2021), and The Adventure of Relevance: An Ethics of Social Inquiry (Palgrave, 2016), and co-editor of After Progress (Sage, 2022), and Speculative Research: The Lure of Possible Futures (Routledge, 2017). His forthcoming book is Exology: Planetary Upheaval and Social Life (Open Humanities Press).

The Zoom link will be circulated closer to the event.

Please note that this event is free to attend.

This talk is organised by the Institute for Medical Humanities' Weather, Climate, and Health Research Theme, co-led by: Jed Stevenson (Anthropology), Maximilian Hepach (Geography) and Angela Marques Filipe (Sociology).