Next meeting will be at IFP on Sunday 9 September, 1 – 4pm.

Continuing last meeting’s avian thread, and ‘thinking with’ the fleet of racing pigeons living just beside IFP, this time we’ll read a short piece by Belgian philosopher of science Vinciane Despret on the extinct passenger pigeon, ‘Afterword: It Is an Entire World That Has Disappeared’, from the recent edited collection Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (2017). We could then take a look at an article by the same author (with Michel Meuret), ‘Cosmoecological Sheep and the Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet’ (2016), from the open-access journal Environmental Humanities, about some surprising proactive responses to the extinction of ways-of-life, rather than species.

We’ll also consider how such lines of thinking resonate here in China, in connection with particular local extinctions, and how they may be translated into the form of an art project, that you could be part of.

RSVP with your email address for further details.

[image: HAYASHI AND TODA, FROM ORTHOGENETIC EVOLUTION IN THE PIGEONS (CA. 1920); WIKIMEDIA COMMONS]

The reading group had its first meeting a couple of weeks ago on a Sunday afternoon with around nine participants. We started by together reading through the introduction to Thom van Dooren’s Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction, which focuses on disappearing birds and the relationships they take with them. We also shared some tea and talked about where the idea for the group came from and how it could develop from here.