Upcoming Events
CASI Fifth Annual Conference: Contesting Nature in Central Asia
September 16-17, 2016
American University of Central Asia
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
The relationship between humans and their environments is central to both natural and social sciences, yet the fundamental distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ is a major reason behind segregating these bodies of knowledge into two distinct fields. ‘Nature’ is often utilized as a shorthand for the unchanging laws of existence, the inexorable materiality of being, for inevitability, determinism and teleology. As such, the notion of ‘nature’ has been challenged by many scholars as a ‘social construction’, whereby neither humans nor their environments are ever fully ‘natural’ or ‘cultural’, but rather are mutually constituted through a network of complex interactions.
The working languages of the conference are English and Russian.
