Carl Olsson
Carl's PhD project title is 'Can you think about yourself as a rock?'. Read more about Carl's research.
Project title
Can you think about yourself as a rock?
Supervisors
Research Clusters
Project description
An incredible amount of work dedicated to critiquing the figure of 'the human' has taken place in the humanities over the past fifty years, in ways that have not always converged. Human geography has its own stakes in this history, where some recent iterations concern the role of geological processes in constituting human beings.
My project responds to this thinking by asking in what ways talking about oneself on Earth is constrained by one's being able to do so in the first place: What does it take for something to count as a self-description on this planet? How can different ways in which humans describe themselves be mapped onto one another? Can you actually think about yourself as a rock?
In posing these questions, I will be drawing from (in geography) underutilized resources from the continental and analytic traditions in philosophy as well as descriptions of troubled relationships between subjecthood and space in the history of psychology.
Aside from my DPhil project, I write satirical fiction and collaborate with artists, scientists and designers who use various 'digital methods'.
Publications
Peer-reviewed articles
Carl Christian Olsson (2021) The Anthropocene conjecture and Wilfrid Sellars’ scientific image: (another) prolegomenon to rethinking the human?, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 103:2, 103-115, DOI: 10.1080/04353684.2021.1891448
Book chapters
Carl Olsson (forthcoming) “Study for ‘Memories of the Apocalypse” in Imagining Apocalyptic Politics for the Anthropocene, Harper, E. T., and Specht, D. (eds.). Routledge Environmental Humanities Series.
Carl Olsson (2021) "Revisiting Deleuze's Bestiary: What Difference do Monsters make?" in Monstrous Ontologies: Politics Ethics Materiality, Nirta, C. and Pavoni, A. (eds.). Vernon Press, pp. 77-94.
Online Articles and Fiction
Carl Olsson, Dana Molzhigit, Dmitrii Aparin, M.C. Abbott (2021) "Another kind of 'Technocracy'". In For Planetary Governance. Strelka Mag, 16/07/2021. Available at: https://strelkamag.com/en/article/another-kind-of-technocracy
Carl Olsson (2020) “The Beast Beneath”. &&& Platform, 26/10/2020. Available at: https://tripleampersand.org/the-beast-beneath-2/
Academic qualifications
- MSc Human Geography (2018), Lund University
- BSc Geography (2016), University of Gothenburg
Contact and further information
You can find out more about Carl and his research via his Twitter handle.