Event
J. Irwin Miller Symposium
World Ecologies in Formation
Engaging contemporary framings of our climate and economic crises, World Ecologies in Formation investigates the social and environmental dialectics that have given rise to both historical and emerging twenty-first-century built cultures including material ecologies, building technologies, energy regimes, landscapes, waterscapes, atmospheres, labor systems, and data infrastructures. Departing from a dual framing of human and non-human systems as discrete processes, the symposium investigates the complex internalization and externalization of socioecological transformations within contemporary built ecologies as active constituents in shaping each other.
By framing “world-ecology” as a system in formation, the symposium engages how transdisciplinary and cross-cultural socioecological concepts are deconstructing, enriching, and reconstituting the fundamentals of future design. We will commit to an investigation of emerging and novel relational models and how they might alter power dynamics in the shaping of environments. The three-day event, organized by Mae-Ling Lokko and the Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture, brings together an interdisciplinary group of anthropologists, architects, artists, scientists, activists, historians, economists, engineers, philosophers, and scientists to investigate how historical, contemporary, and emerging world ecological paradigms continue to shape existing built ecosystems and material artefacts.