Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Environmental Humanities 2018-19

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke Hall

    April 12, 2019

    Pre-circulated reading material excerpted from The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017) served as a starting point at this workshop with Macarena Gómez-Barris.

    Macarena Gómez-Barris is Professor and Chairperson of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. She is also Director of the Global South Center (GSC), a research center that works at the intersection of social ecologies, art and politics, and decolonial methodologies. Her instructional focus is on Latinx and Latin American Studies, memory and the afterlives of violence, decolonial theory, the art of social protest, and queer femme epistemes. 

    Gómez-Barris is the author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press, 2009), co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of the Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017) and Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Politics in the Americas (University of California Press, 2018). 

    Gómez-Barris is series editor, with Diana Taylor, of Dissident Acts, a Duke University Press Series, and was Fulbright Fellow at FLACSO-Quito in Ecuador (2014–15). She is the current co-editor with Marcial Godoy-Anatavia of e-misférica, an online trilingual journal on hemispheric art and politics (NYU). She is also a member of the Social Text journal collective.

    This event was presented by the Environmental Humanities Initiative and co-sponsored by the C.V. Starr Lectureship Fund, the Watson Institute, the Departments of History and Religious Studies, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    April 11, 2019

    The tree and the forest is the site of environmental humanities and multidisciplinary inquiry. By engaging the materiality of land, place, and the idea of the tree as knowledge, Macarena Gómez-Barris addressed the forest as a particular site of material and representational evacuation. Extending ideas from her book The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017) on Indigenous aesthetics and social movements, Gómez-Barris considered modes of thinking about archives, counter-visuality, resistance, and recovery that work against the inevitability of the forest’s elimination. Where does the regenerative potential exist that challenges and moves us beyond the paradigm of no future?

    Macarena Gómez-Barris is Professor and Chairperson of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. She is also Director of the Global South Center (GSC), a research center that works at the intersection of social ecologies, art and politics, and decolonial methodologies. Her instructional focus is on Latinx and Latin American Studies, memory and the afterlives of violence, decolonial theory, the art of social protest, and queer femme epistemes. 

    Gómez-Barris is the author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press, 2009), co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of the Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017) and Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Politics in the Americas (University of California Press, 2018). 

    Gómez-Barris is series editor, with Diana Taylor, of Dissident Acts, a Duke University Press Series, and was Fulbright Fellow at FLACSO-Quito in Ecuador (2014–15). She is the current co-editor with Marcial Godoy-Anatavia of e-misférica, an online trilingual journal on hemispheric art and politics (NYU). She is also a member of the Social Text journal collective.

    This event, free and open to the public, was presented by the Environmental Humanities Initiative and co-sponsored by the C.V. Starr Lectureship Fund, the Watson Institute, the Departments of History and Religious Studies, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke Hall

    February 1, 2019

    The discussion focused on the pre-industrial era of American history, the arrival of the industrial revolution, and the crucial turn toward carbon-based energy in the U.S. 

    Joyce Chaplin (BA Northwestern; MA and PhD, Johns Hopkins) is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. A former Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom, she has taught at six universities on two continents, a peninsula, and an island, and in a maritime studies program on the Atlantic Ocean. Her most recent works include Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (Simon & Schuster, 2012), and (with Alison Bashford) The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population (Princeton University Press, 2016). She is the editor of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton, 2012) and Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton, 2017). Her reviews and essays have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times Book Review, and the London Review of Books. Her work has been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Estonian, and, forthcoming, into Turkish and Chinese. She is a current Guggenheim Fellow; she tweets @JoyceChaplin1.

    This event was presented by the Environmental Humanities Initiative and co-sponsored by the C.V. Starr Lectureship Fund, the Watson Institute, the Departments of History and Religious Studies, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    January 31, 2019

    Joyce Chaplin’s research examines climate change and climate science in eighteenth-century early America, focusing on awareness of and responses to the Little Ice Age. The invention and circulation of the Franklin stove is the central example of her study. Climate history is an important new subject for historians, given that public debates over climate and resource scarcity have become urgent. Belief that our dilemma is unprecedented is inaccurate and unhelpful, perhaps especially within the United States. Climate-change mitigation existed in the past and analysis of it reveals useful patterns of success and failure. Early American history has tended to emphasize non-environmental themes and events — especially the American Revolution as national pivot. But this history of politics, of human-to-human relations, was always entangled in human use and knowledge of the natural world. Early Americans themselves knew this. Benjamin Franklin knew he was living in an age of climate change, in response to which he designed a heating system and articulated a climate science. Both are significant. Franklin’s proposals about maximizing the production of heat from a minimal quantity of fuel were widely translated and discussed — they were profound Enlightenment statements about settler colonialism, resource conservation, and climate change.

    Joyce E. Chaplin (BA Northwestern; MA and PhD, Johns Hopkins) is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. A former Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom, she has taught at six universities on two continents, a peninsula, and an island, and in a maritime studies program on the Atlantic Ocean. Her most recent works include Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (Simon & Schuster, 2012), and (with Alison Bashford) The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population (Princeton University Press, 2016). She is the editor of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton, 2012) and Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton, 2017). Her reviews and essays have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times Book Review, and the London Review of Books. Her work has been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Estonian, and, forthcoming, into Turkish and Chinese. She is a current Guggenheim Fellow; she tweets @JoyceChaplin1.

    This event, free and open to the public, was presented by the Environmental Humanities Initiative and was co-sponsored by the C.V. Starr Lectureship Fund, the Watson Institute, the Departments of History and Religious Studies, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: To be determined

    November 16, 2018

    For this ‘Environmental Humanities’ workshop Damian White provided his article “Critical Design, Hybrid Labor, Just Transitions: Moving beyond technocratic ecomodernisms and the it’s-too-late-o-cene” as a starting point for discussion.

    Damian White is Professor of Social Theory and the Environment and Dean of Liberal Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is the author of Bookchin: A Critical Appraisal (2008); Environments, Natures and Social Theory: Towards a Critical Hybridity (2016) and the co-editor of Technonatures (2009) and Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader (2011).

    This event was presented by the Environmental Humanities Initiative and co-sponsored by the C.V. Starr Lectureship Fund, the Watson Institute, the Departments of History and Religious Studies, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    November 15, 2018

    On the climate front, events are moving from bad to worse with alarming speed. With fossil fueled neo-liberalism hurtling towards climate chaos and authoritarian populisms, where is there room for hope? In this talk, Damian White reflected on the contributions that mobilizations concern with just transitions running alongside a vibrant explosion of interest in design for transitions might make for re-grounding a political ecology of hope in dangerous times. The just transition is a concept that has its roots in the labor movement. Of late, it has been adopted by a broader array of forces: from democratic socialists to environmental and racial justice advocates, from feminists to decolonial-indigenous forces as a means of thinking about the political strategies and alliance building for moving post-carbon transitions forward. The emerging field of design for transitions equally is attempting to draw a broad range of design activists, radical municipalists, peer to peer hackers, commoners and others to think about the platforms, prototypes, cultural and design interventions that could aggregate multiple modes of redirective practice that could be unleashed to build post-carbon futures. At present, these currents often talk past each other. This paper explored tensions and conflicts emerging within both fields. It also reflected on the spaces for further engagement. There are of course no quick fixes or easy solutions to our climate crisis. But it is suggested that a post-carbon politics that is experimental, iterative and inventive in its outlook, marked by a degree of democratic maker-ly ambition and a post-carbon politics that foregrounds the potential creativity of labor has much to recommend itself.

    Damian White is Professor of Social Theory and the Environment and Dean of Liberal Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is the author of Bookchin: A Critical Appraisal (2008); Environments, Natures and Social Theory: Towards a Critical Hybridity (2016) and the co-editor of Technonatures (2009) and Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader (2011).

    This event, free and open to the public, was presented by the Environmental Humanities Initiative and co-sponsored by the C.V. Starr Lectureship Fund, the Watson Institute, the Departments of History and Religious Studies, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.