Anna L. Tsing, professor of anthropology at University of California-Santa Cruz, will give a public talk on The Adventures of Form.

Overview of the Talk

Nonliving beings make worlds, and stories, through their physical form—just as living beings do. The adventures of infrastructure as form take us beyond its designated role as service provider into feral territory, where it hooks up with all kinds of creatures, human and nonhuman, living and not, and both generous and deadly. This talk takes listeners to the town of Sorong in Indonesian Papua, where Indonesian settlers have overwhelmed and displaced Indigenous Papuans through infrastructure. Infrastructures here can be suffocating and violent as they transform the land; waste places can be gifts. The talk follows physical forms in action in building the settler city, complete with its chronic floods, disappearing plants and animals, and still remaining, if largely unrecognized, spaces of refuge.

Speaker Bio

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Niels Bohr Professor in the Department of Culture and Society at Aarhus University in Denmark. She is the author of In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-way Place (1993), Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2004), The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins (2015), Feral Atlas (2020), Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene (2024) and other award-winning books, and scores of articles/chapters on climate change, environmental degradation, and life in the Anthropocene.

Event Details

Thurs., October 30, 2025
3-4:30 p.m.
LSC Ballroom A