Book Talk with Dr. Bram Büscher
In this talk Bram Büscher will present his book The Truth about Nature: Environmentalism in the Era of Post-Truth Politics and Platform Capitalism. This book follows environmental actors as they turn to the internet to save nature, documenting how conservation efforts are transformed through internet platforms and algorithmic feeds in the era of “post-truth politics.” He develops a novel approach to post-truth as being an expression of a form of capitalism that exerts power through internet platforms, and which he dubs “platform capitalism.” Bram Büscher is especially concerned with showing how environmental actors attempt to mediate between the structures of power embedded in these platforms and the histories and contexts of particular environmental issues, focusing on wildlife protection in Southern Africa.
Bram Büscher is tt备用网址 and Chair at the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University. In his research and writing he looks at different aspects of nature-society relations in their political-economic, social and historical contexts. Most fundamentally, he has been interested in empirically investigating and theoretically exploring the intersections between historical and contemporary neoliberal capitalism and the environment. He starts from the assumption that capitalism has deeply yet unevenly influenced the ways humans exploit, conserve or otherwise relate to biodiversity and nonhuman natures and that this process fundamentally influences broader dynamics of development and change.
Methodologically, he combines multi-level, engaged ethnography with discourse analysis and ‘deep reading’ to capture how actors and their lived realities co-constitute and are co-constituted by structural power dynamics over time. In addition to The Truth about Nature, he is the author of Transforming the Frontier: Peace Parks and the Politics of Neoliberal Conservation in Southern Africa and coauthor of The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene.
The booktalk will be in English.