We would like to invite you to the first Teatime Talk as part of the series "Planetability" on Thursday, November 27th 2025 at 5pm at the HafenCity University.


Planetability: Towards a Transdisciplinary Understanding of Planetary Health and Cohabitation

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-Scot 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 the 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. 


Technopolitics of Planetability: Multispecies Futures Between Brazil and Germany

Jonathan Madeira (UFRGS)

About the Lecture:
This talk explores how contemporary transformations in human–animal relations unfold across two interconnected ethnographic sites: the cattle ranching landscapes of the Brazilian Pampa and the heritage farm-museum Domäne Dahlem in Berlin. Through a multispecies ethnographic approach, I examine how emerging technogenetic infrastructures—ranging from genomic selection and data-driven livestock management to digital sensing tools—reconfigure ecologies, rural livelihoods, and the very possibilities of multispecies coexistence. This methodological framework enables the analytical connection between these two research worlds by attending to how humans and other organisms co-produce landscapes and futures. Throughout the talk, I will outline the conceptual foundations of this approach and offer concrete examples of how it can be mobilized to examine both empirical contexts. In the Pampa, the pursuit of productivity, genetic precision, and market differentiation generates processes described as subtle extinctions: the gradual disappearance not only of domestic biodiversity, but also of practices, relationships, and forms of life that once sustained diverse multispecies worlds. Domäne Dahlem offers a contrasting case, where endangered domestic breeds and agricultural traditions are preserved through practices of care, memory, and ecological stewardship. Bringing these two sites into dialogue, the talk reflects on the concept of planetability as an alternative to technocratic notions of sustainability. Planetability foregrounds the capacity to inhabit the planet with others, acknowledging interdependence, vulnerability, and the need to cultivate futures in which multiple forms of life can persist. The session will conclude with a short hands-on exercise and collective discussion inviting participants to explore multispecies approaches as a methodological tool for their own work—considering how such a perspective might reshape the way they observe, analyze, and engage with the empirical contexts and research realities they inhabit.

About the Lecturer:
Jonathan Madeira is a Social Scientist and PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). He conducted part of his doctoral research at Technische Universität Berlin as a Guest Researcher at the Chair for Urban Design and Urbanization through the PROBRAL program. He is affiliated with the Multispecies Anthropology Research Group (NAM/UFRGS), the Covid-19 Humanities Network (MCTI), and The lab Planetary Tactics for Cohabitation (TU Berlin). His work investigates how technological innovations reshape rural labor and transform multispecies relations among humans, animals, and environments in the Pampa region of southern Brazil.