Jen Parker-Starbuck public lecture: 'The Sea is on Fire"

Professor Jen Parker-Starbuck of Royal Holloway, University of London, presented a public lecture at the University of Melbourne on 29 September 2022, part of a visit to Australia sponsored by the Macgeorge Bequest under the Macgeorge Visiting Speaker Award.

Professor Parker-Starbuck's lecture was entitled The Sea is on Fire: Machinic Crustaceans and Ecological Promises and explored how machinic (and substitute) nonhuman animals stand in for their real and fictitious counterparts, and how these stand-ins might draw attention to the technologies that both help and hinder environmental concerns and nonhuman futures. The lecture focused on Les Machines de L’île in Nantes, France, a “theme park” of mechanical animals and sea creatures, and on a recent play Yellowfin, which imagines a world with oceans empty of fish.