We would like to invite you to the next Teatime Talk in the "Planetability" series on Wednesday, May 6th, 2026, at 6:00 pm in the Auditorium at HafenCity University Hamburg.

Introduction to planetary thinking: A critical reflection on the frameworks of ‘planetary health’ and ‘planetary boundaries’

Lijuan Klassen (Rachel Carson Center, Munich)

About the talk:
Over the past decade, the planetary has emerged as a key concept across the humanities and social sciences, aiming to capture the scale and complexity of contemporary crises. ‘The planetary’ moves beyond earlier imaginaries of the whole Earth, epitomised by NASA’s ‘Blue Marble’ and ‘Earth-rise’ photographs, which symbolised both Cold War ideologies of global management and environmentalist sentiments to protect the planet. Rather than representing a unified object the term indicates a novel condition, as well as a critical analytic and an ethical imperative that reframe questions around environmental change, habitability, and justice. This lecture offers an introductory overview of some foundational texts on ‘the planetary’, mapping out what we might mean by planetary thinking as one component of the planetability triad. It begins with the understanding of the planetary as a novel existential condition that undoes human exceptionalism (Latour 2018, Chakrabarty 2019) embedded within Anthropocene and Earth System Science discourses. At the same time, the decentering of ‘human' points to the fact that the Anthropos has never been a unified category but has always been marked by exclusion. With power placed at the centre of analysis, the lecture turns to the notion of ‘the planet as praxis’ (Gabrys 2018) that brings in questions of care and collective responsibility (Spivak 2012). Against this conceptual backdrop, we will critically engage with emerging interdisciplinary frameworks such as ‘planetary health’ and ‘planetary boundaries’, asking how planetary thinking can be translated beyond the humanities. Together we will asks in how far these frameworks offer useful tools for acting and designing sustainably at planetary scale, or risk reproducing the very exclusions and forms of governance that planetary thinking seeks to challenge.

About the speaker:
Lijuan Klassen is a cultural analyst and currently PhD candidate at the Rachel Carson Center (RCC) and the Munich Science Communication Lab (MSCL), at Ludwig Maximilian University. Her dissertation examines the discourse on planetary health from an environmental humanities perspective. Drawing on feminist care critiques, environmental media studies and political ecology, her research explores how current and historical representations, narratives and metaphors have shaped public and scientific understandings of the relationship between human and planetary health(s). In the context of the PROBAL program, she visited the Planetary Health Hub in São Paolo and conducted field research at the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro. Together with Christof Mauch, she is the co-editor of a special issue on 'Imagining Planetary Health, Well-Being and Habitability' in Global Environment.

Planetability: Co-habitation in the Planetary

Planetability brings together German and Brazilian researchers across Urban Design, Engineering, Architecture, Urban Geography, Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Biology to advance a critical interdisciplinary understanding of Planetary Health. The project integrates recent debates on “multispecies urbanism” and the future design of healthy and equitable cities. It is funded by  DAAD-CAPES PROBRAL and co-led by Jamie-Scott Baxter (HCU), Laura Kemmer (USP), David Sperling (USP) and Tatiana Souza de Camargo (UFRGS).

Planetability combines three interlinked dimensions: planetary health, planetary thinking, and planetary transformation. Each dimension addresses a gap and enriches existing scholarship in the others. The field of planetary health, particularly prominent in Brazilian debates, emphasises the interconnection between human and environmental health under climate change. Whereas multispecies urbanism applies critical social theory under the umbrella of planetary thinking to urban contexts. For example, where traditional global health research has been criticised for reducing the environment to a determinant of human health, planetability opens the category of the environment to the multiple forms of life, elements and abiotic forces that constitute it. By drawing on critical feminist theory, this approach is attentive to the ways agency and, in turn, health are distributed and performed in human-nonhuman constellations. Together, these first two dimensions provide the grounding for the third: to examine planetary transformations through the lens of human and nonhuman health relations and the possibility of just and ethical forms of urban cohabitation.