'Read the Room': Environmental Humanities Slow Reading Group in Spring/Summer 2026
Dr. Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell, from our own department, and Clara Hebel, MA, from Goethe University Frankfurt, are thrilled to invite you to a new installment of ‘Read the Room,’ their Environmental Humanities Slow Reading Group:
"This Reading Group is open to all researchers (specifically Master’s students, PhDs, Postdocs, Profs) interested in the burgeoning field of the Environmental Humanities. We will meet online fortnightly during the spring/summer (please see dates below), and venture into reading Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990, transl. 1997). Long recognized as one of the greatest writers and thinkers of our times, Glissant has so far been read mostly in cultural studies, yet his work is increasingly gaining relevance in the Environmental Humanities. Considering the entanglements between cultural and environmental studies, we will discuss and analyse the text’s significance for our contemporary moment.
"The format of this group follows the principles of slow, emergent, and collective scholarship. While gathered online, we will silently read a section of the text, and then discuss it together. This means that no prior preparation is necessary, nor is registration. It doesn’t matter if you show up only once and not from the start; if you’re interested, just come along!
"Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation
In Poetics of Relation, Glissant turns the concrete particulars of Caribbean reality into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation. He sees the Antilles as enduring suffering imposed by history, yet as a place whose unique interactions will one day produce an emerging global consensus. Arguing that the writer alone can tap the unconscious of a people and apprehend its multiform culture to provide forms of memory capable of transcending "nonhistory," Glissant defines his "poetics of relation"--both aesthetic and political--as a transformative mode of history, capable of enunciating and making concrete a French-Caribbean reality with a self-defined past and future. Glissant's notions of identity as constructed in relation and not in isolation are germane not only to discussions of Caribbean creolization but also to our understanding of transculturality. In Glissant's view, we come to see that relation in all its senses--telling, listening, connecting, and the parallel consciousness of self and surroundings--is the key to transforming mentalities and reshaping societies."
Poetics of Relation is available as a PDF under the following link: https://monoskop.org/images/2/23/Glissant_Edouard_Poetics_of_Relation.pdf
Please join us via the following Zoom link:
https://uzh.zoom.us/j/67385372114?pwd=UFXHMwJD4RUt0R8UKuFL22KSbAZcxP.1
Dates spring/summer 2026:
Thursday, 23.04.
Thursday, 07.05.
Thursday, 28.05.
Thursday, 11.06.
Thursday, 25.06.
Thursday, 09.07.
4 - 5:30 p.m. (s.t.)
‘Read the Room' is a collaboration between Goethe University Frankfurt and University of Zurich.
We hope to see you soon (& feel free to spread the word)!
You can download the poster here (PDF, 1 MB).