The Forest University is an ongoing and ever-present site for learning and the production of multiple forms of knowledge. The forest itself has been, is, and continues on as the university. In these conversations, we offer perspectives on human relationships to the forest in an effort to generate knowledge about the social construction of nature.

Begun in the Than Bok Khoranee National Park, as part of Le Musee de Grand Dehors and the 2018 Thailand Biennial, the Forest University has hosted conversations with artists, art historians, forest educators, forest managers, indigenous activists, Muslim and Buddhist thinkers in conversations designed to illuminate and contemplate the relationship between humans and the forest. In these conversations, we consider deep time as it persists in carbon, an element that is essential to all life forms and that ties all beings and things together through the larger planetary carbon cycle.

“We are stardust, we are golden we are billion year old carbon.” -Joni Mitchell

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January 12, 2019 – How the Forest Speaks and the Many Ways we Listen with Ajjana Wajidee (Noona), Nurhisam Binmamu (Sum Nara Nara) and Rungrueang Rahmanyah (B’Nee)

January 13, 2019 – The Indigenous Forest with Chumsak Nararatwong

January 19, 2019 – Thinking with Carbon in the Neecrone: Art and Living Our Dying  with Jill Casid, author of Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization

January 20, 2019 – Buddhism and Forest Conservation with Sulak Sivaraksa