Environmental Humanities Seminar, “Playing with Extinction”, September 12th

The next session of the LARCA’s Environmental Humanities seminar will take place on the 12th of September 2024 from 2pm to 4pm Paris time. Pr. Dolly Jørgensen (Professor of History, University of Stavanger, Norway) will be giving a paper titled “Playing with extinction,” which will focus on extinction narratives in museums.

The seminar will take place both online and at the ICP (74 rue de Vaugirard, 75006 Paris), salle C10, Maison de la recherche.
This is a joint session with the LARCA‘s Environmental Humanities and Arts and Visual Cultures research seminars, as well as with the ICP’s “Humanités et questions environnementales” research group.

Teams link: https://teams.microsoft.com/dl/launcher/launcher.html?url=%2F_%23%2Fl%2Fmeetup-join%2F19%3Ameeting_NzZhMTA4YjUtMmY0My00MzRlLTkyMjMtZjVhZGQwNGEyMzAz%40thread.v2%2F0%3Fcontext%3D%257b%2522Tid%2522%253a%25220e0300d7-80a2-419f-a335-646daa467663%2522%252c%2522Oid%2522%253a%252244f16931-bae9-4e31-bbc6-0da8254fd11b%2522%257d%26anon%3Dtrue&type=meetup-join&deeplinkId=f99e53b7-8284-44fc-a690-c345fc1661c2&directDl=true&msLaunch=true&enableMobilePage=true&suppressPrompt=true

Abstract: “Playing with extinction”: Natural history museums often hold the last tangible remains of extinct animals. The histories of those extinctions are tragic and horrible, and are often told in environmental humanities scholarship as such. But can extinction histories also be told in engaging, even playful, ways to reach new audiences?

This paper wants to push scholars to consider the ways in which extinction histories are communicated in public venues like museums. I examine augmented reality exhibitions such as the Revive exhibition at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, the Dodo Expedition at the Mauritius Museum of Natural History, and the Skin & Bones downloadable application at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C., to interrogate how they play with extinction. In these museum experiences, the history of extinction and the bodies of the extinct literally come to life through AR. In addition to these high tech ways of playing with extinct animals, museums also use low tech interactives to add liveliness to the dead. I argue that putting skin on the bones of extinct animals and animating them in lively ways puts visitors into an embodied relation with both extinction and history.

Biography: Dolly Jørgensen is Professor of History, University of Stavanger, Norway. Her current research agenda focuses on cultural histories of animals. She published The Medieval Pig (Boydell, 2024) and Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging (MIT Press, 2019), and her book Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums will appear with University of Chicago Press in 2025. She is co-editor-in-chief of the journal Environmental Humanities and co-directs The Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at University of Stavanger. She is currently Laureate of the Åsgard programme of the Institut français de Norvège.