Please join us for our next lecture in our ongoing Buddhism and Posthumanism series!
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DESCRIPTION
In recent years, both the role of emotions in Buddhist teachings and practices as well as Buddhist positions towards more-than-human actors and environmental concerns have come to the forefront of academic and nonacademic debates. What unites both concerns is often a “how to” approach—“How to Feel” (Heim, 2025), or how “environmental” Buddhism(s) was/were (Elverskog, 2020), and how to use Buddhist teaching and practice to face the concerns of the current climate crisis. This talk turns the “how to” approach on its head by focusing instead on the productivity of moments of conflict, crisis, and failure, and on how they are felt. Often, it is when things don’t work out as intended that the underlying mechanics become most visible. Across the Buddhist Pali Canon, in suttas and jatakas, such moments are crucial in putting doctrine and its practical application to the test. At the same time, it is precisely here that the texts most explicitly reveal an inherently emotional/affective concern with multiperspectivism in the encounters between humans, nonhuman animals, and other living beings, including plants and spirits. This talk, therefore, focuses on the constructive energies of moments of crisis and failure to develop reflections about drawing on the early South Asian Buddhist texts as epistemological inspiration for historical research, bringing the canon into dialogue with current approaches in the study of emotion, new materialism, and posthumanism.
BIO
Frederik Schröer is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Global History at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. With a background in South Asian and Tibetan Buddhist studies (University of Vienna, Austria), his work sits at the intersection between environmental history and the transnational history of South Asian Buddhism in the colonial period. Having completed his PhD on the role of emotions in the early Tibetan diaspora in India at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development Berlin, his current project focuses on human-environment relations among Buddhist reformers in late 19th and early 20th-century British India. Conceptually, Frederik explores the role of emotions in human-nonhuman entanglements in dialogue with early Buddhist epistemologies and posthumanism/new materialism. He is an editor of the journal Contributions to the History of Concepts.
