Bram Büscher – Professor and Chair of the Sociology of Development and Change at Wageningen University in the Netherlands – will visit Massey’s Manawatū campus next week. Prof Büscher will provide the closing keynote at the The 2025 Aotearoa SDG Summit at Massey University (4–5 September), which “brings together leaders from across Aotearoa to drive urgent action on sustainability”.
He will also give a seminar for the PERC 10th anniversary Environmental Futures Seminar Series on Wednesday 3rd Sept at 12 noon in SST3,07, and available on zoom (link to join)
Unsettled conservation: Thinking, researching and acting for nature in an era of illiberal breakdown, capitalist brutalism and AI-driven post-truth
As global political dynamics are heating up amidst rising authoritarianism, violent, even genocidal conflicts and a crumbling international system, how to think about, do research on and take action for environmental issues that also continue to worsen rapidly? In this presentation, I reflect on this question by combining earlier research on the link between conservation and digital media and more recent work on the relations between artificial intelligence, post-truth and capitalist power. Building on Achille Mbembe’s concept of ‘brutalism’, I show how current forms of AI-driven capitalism are central to the rise of post-truth, authoritarianism and new forms of resource and power-grabs, and how these are marginalizing the already limited gains that neoliberal environmentalism made over the past decades. This moment of ‘unsettled conservation’, I will argue, also provides an opportunity to renew the critique of neoliberal environmentalism and, on this basis, propose alternatives going forward. I conclude by reflecting on how ‘planetary ethnography’ can renew this critique and whether ‘convivial conservation’ can be such a systemic alternative going forward.
