Vox Mundi Straining to Make Sense of the Ecological Voice
Thursday 7 May 2026, 12 midday - 1.30pm
Seminar Room 63, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
All welcome
This talk explores how scientists, artists, academics, activists, and other kindred spirits, are attempting to “tune in” to the wavelength of the planet: a practice that carries with it a particularly pressing urgency in a time of climate crisis and environmental devastation. Whether this be listening carefully to the famous song of humpback whales, the more muffled expressions of mushrooms, or the silent swan-song of melting glaciers, the vox mundi is an intriguing figure through which we might reorient our own relationship to the challenges of the Anthropocene. But what is really at stake in such attempts to “listen to the world”? Are we truly finding expedient ways to attend to a forthcoming, communicative, or even effusively verbose, planet? Or are we inventing new ways to ventriloquize our own all-too-human mantras into an amplified echo of our own narcissistic species-being?
The chapter will be discussed by Professor Naomi Waltham-Smith (Music, Oxford).
Professor Dominic Pettman is University Professor of Media and New Humanities at The New School, in New York City, his research spans across various fields such as posthumanism, animal studies, critical theories of technology, environmental humanities, attention ecologies, popular media forms, and philosophies of desire. He is the author of Telling the Bees: An Interspecies Monologue (Fordham, 2024), Peak Libido: Sex, Ecology, and the Collapse of Desire Polity, 2020), Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (Stanford, 2017).
