More-than-human humanities research group!

Tag: environmental justice

Environmental Racism is Garbage! Symposium – Call for Submissions, deadline 30 Nov, 2020

Submission Deadline:  30 November 2020  
Symposium: 27-29 May 2021  

The aim of this interactive virtual research-creation and art symposium is to bear modest witness to waste as a symptom of environmental racism. At least one billion people live in over a quarter of a million slums worldwide, often with no formal waste or sanitation infrastructure or services (Davis 2007). And in economically affluent countries, landfills and other waste management systems are most often sited in or close to poor and racialized communities (for example, Amegah and Jaakkola 2016; Furedy 1993; Mothiba, Moja, and Loans 2017; Parizeau 2006) who bear a disproportionate burden of persistent exposure to the risks, hazards and contamination of pollution (Hird in press; Hird and Zahara 2016). 

Environmental Racism is Garbage seeks knowledge production and acts of resistance at the intersection of art, politics, and the relationship between racialized injustice and ecological crisis. We invite contributions and collaborations from visual and performance-based artists, curators, theorists and activists, to create submissions that engage with the interconnections between environmental health, socio-economic conditions, racialized discrimination, social justice. We are interested in new or recent work in any medium that could be displayed in a browser. Transdisciplinary work driven by creative inquiry and lived experience will be forefronted.

This virtual (web-based) symposium will be synchronous and asynchronous and feature artwork displayed in the browser as well as keynote speakers, discussion panels and other additions. The symposium will be archived on a dedicated website.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

  1. Project description and [technical] requirements for displaying (online), including artist/author statement (2 pages maximum).
  2. Supporting documentation: i.e. maximum 5 images, 1 (3 min or under) video clip or sound recording sample.
  3. Current CV (3 pages maximum) for all team members
  4. Artist/author/activist/curator/theorist biography for all team members (maximum 100 words each)

Please submit your work through this form by November 30, 2020. Submissions will be reviewed by a transdisciplinary panel including members of The Seedbox Consortium, Canada’s Waste Flow, and Queen’s University. 

Priority will be given to applicants who are Indigenous, Black, people of colour, women, LGBTQ2+, people with disabilities, and/or are members of other equity-seeking groups.

Each project selected will receive a payment of $1000 CAD and another $500 CAD per additional artist, for a total of up to $2000 CAD per submission. Project Fees will be paid after completion of the symposium. Details of the post-symposium publication to follow.
The full call for submission can be found here
Please submit projects here by November 30th, 2020  

We invite you to share this call with colleagues who might be interested, and direct any questions to: help@environmentalracismisgarbage.art

Environmental Justice Resources Online!

The Environment & Society Portal team, together with alumni fellows Malcom Ferdinand, Rob Gioielli, and our new RCC editor Kristy Henderson, created the new site Environmental Justice Resources Online, in order to highlight digital resources related to environmental justice and environmental racism. Please circulate widely!

As with their site Pandemics in Context, the Environment & Society Portal aims to point its users around the world to resources freely accessible without subscription or login. They invite you to have a look at both pages and send (portal@carsoncenter.lmu.de) your recommendations for freely available digital readings and multimedia resources–and remind us of your important publications we may have missed.

The Posthumanities Hub Seminar with Dr. Lauren LaFauci

Welcome to the Posthumanities Hub seminar with Dr. Lauren LaFauci (Linköping University, SE) on “Histories and Perceptions of Climate in Early American Literature and Culture”.

The event takes place on 8th April 2019 at 13:15 – 15:00 in the big seminar room at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Teknikringen 74D, level 5, SE-114 28 Stockholm).

Histories and Perceptions of Climate in Early American Literature and Culture

Abstract:

This society [British America before the Revolution] . . . does not afford that variety of tinges and gradations which may be observed in Europe, we have colours peculiar to ourselves. For instance, it is natural to conceive that those who live near the sea must be very different from those who live in the woods; the intermediate space will afford a separate and distinct class.
Men are like plants; the goodness and flavor of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow. We are nothing but what we derive from the air we breathe, the climate we inhabit, the government we obey, the system of religion we profess, and the nature of our employment.
. . .Whoever traverses the continent must easily observe those strong differences, which will grow more evident in time. The inhabitants of Canada, Massachusetts, the middle provinces, the southern ones, will be as different as their climates; their only points of unity will be those of religion and language.
—J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letter III, Letters from an American Farmer (1782)

In this passage from Crèvecoeur’s famous essay, “What is an American,” he offers a defining imagination of Americans growing alongside and in harmony with their environments. Importantly, he considers the social, political, cultural, and ecological as all part of the “environment” shaping the individual, and ultimately, the collective in the nation that was then taking shape. While Crèvecoeur himself fled the “New World” upon outbreak of Revolution to return to the Old, his collection of Letters from an American Farmer defined for many Europeans and Americans alike a way of understanding the citizen as an ever-evolving constellation of multivalent forces acting upon the body.

How did early Americans imagine, perceive, and interpret their climate? How did these formulations change over time, between first European contact and the turn of the 20th century? This talk will provide an overview of some of the ideas and assumptions about weather and climate common to early Americans. The place-based ontology Crèvecoeur theorizes here was not in itself a new way of understanding human development, but his formulation opened up the space for an enormous variety of regional and local human peculiarities as varied as the climates (and weathers) associated with them. The resultant environmental determinism became, in the United States at least, the dominant way of theorizing embodiment—including physical and mental disease and health—until the advent of germ theory at the turn of the 20th century.

A second, broader concern of this talk is to discuss the role of historicist environmental humanities work in an age of climate change. Much environmental humanities research is, understandably, presentist: we face a daily barrage of environmental crises, local and global, as well as the longer-term, slower violences of climate change at large. Amidst these imminent crises, the presentist focus is not only understandable; it may also be desirable. But where does such a focus leave those of us who spend our days teaching and researching in pre-Anthropocenic periods? What is the relevance and significance of environmental humanities research before the Anthropocene? What does such work have to contribute to environmental humanities at large? This second focus of my talk will, I hope, generate discussion about the theoretical concepts, empirical materials, and/or historiographical interventions that are significant to EH research today.

Bio:

Lauren LaFauci is assistant professor of environmental humanities in the Unit of Gender Studies, Department of Thematic Studies at Linköping University in Sweden, where she also directs the “Multispecies Stories” research area of the Seed Box Environmental Humanities Collaboratory and serves as an international liaison for ASLE, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. She is part of the interdisciplinary team behind the citizen humanities website, Herbaria 3.0 (www.herbaria3.org), which collects stories about the intertwined relationships between plants and people. Her research and teaching are wide-ranging, focusing on histories of racial formation, medicine, and the body; US literature, history, and culture from to 1900; Scandinavian cultural studies; and multispecies story-telling. Lauren’s talk with the PH Hub will form the basis of a short article in preparation for a Cambridge UP volume on Climate in American Literature.

Who are the feminist environmental and environmental justice heroes currently MISSING from Wikipedia?

Recognizing that Wikipedia is the first point of entry for curious people everywhere, we are launching a new project to increase the representation of key environmental figures on the Wikipedia platform. We are especially interested in women, people of color, and social justice activists, as well as in terms, concepts, or key historical events in the realms of environmental justice and feminist environmental practices.

Who are the people, concepts, or events you have found missing from Wikipedia? Who is there, but needs a more up-to-date or more nuanced entry?

Please feel free to consult either the Swedish or English-language sites, and specify below from which Wikipedia your person, concept, or event is missing. For example, perhaps the English site has a person the Swedish site does not, or vice versa. We aim to update pages for both audiences.

Over the next few months, we’ll be focusing on adding and revising entries within the broad areas of environmental justice and feminist environmental studies, and we’ll keep you posted about our results.

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