Ecologies of Emptiness

The Ecologies of Emptiness project is a collaboration between Sandra Jasper, Adam Searle, and Jonathon Turnbull. It asks the question: how can scholars theorise emptiness across species, scales, and causal agents? Drawing on fieldwork in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine, abandoned spaces in Berlin, and the St Kilda archipelago in the Northern Atlantic, which have diverse relations to emptiness, the researchers are exploring how nature is viewed, valued, and experienced differently at each, developing situated understandings of the varieties of emptiness across species, spaces, and scales. The project attends to the intersections of political economy, political ecology, and the uneven experiences – human and nonhuman – of emptying spaces, and their varying relations to capital.