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Moderator: Tamara Chin, Brown University

Sharon Krause, Brown University • "Political Respect for Nature"

This paper explores the ideal and practice of political respect for nature as a resource for generating more eco-emancipatory forms of political life. After reconstructing the Kantian notion of respect for persons to cover non-human beings and things as well as people, the paper turns to Derrida’s notion of “abyssal rupture” to explore the existential challenges that respect for nature poses to us as human beings, along with the Levinasian concepts of alterity and asymmetrical response across difference as resources for meeting those challenges. I then fill out the ideal of political respect for nature with reference to institutional practices that could combine self-restraint with attunement and responsiveness to the well-being of non-human beings and things.

Branka Arsić, Columbia University • "Marvelous Extinctions: Melville on Animal Suffering"

My talk starts out from remarks Melville left in his Encantadas concerning the Galapagos tortoises, and goes on to examine the scientific and historical archives to which he had recourse, from Cuvier and Broderip to Porter and Delano. On that basis I seek to reconstruct exactly what, in the early 19th century, prompted scientists, doctors and naturalists, as well as traders and ordinary seamen, to obsess about the tortoise as life form, one that was brought to the brink of extinction by the middle of the century. I argue that the reason why both physiologists in Continental scientific laboratories and whalers traversing Antillean waters in trade ships chose this particular animal to answer the question of what life is, derived from their ideas about what constituted pain, suffering, and cruelty. By rehearsing such debates over the presumed expressions of suffering, apathy and indifference on the part of the tortoise, I work to suggest that what scientists understood as apathy towards pain licensed the production of a bizarre taxonomy of life forms based on a creaturely capacity to resist violence. I therefore pay significant attention to the differences that science advanced between biologically—as opposed to psychologically—rational and irrational life forms, which leads to my concluding analysis of why, as a consequence, the irrational was designated as available for experimentation and vivisection.

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Moderator: Jeffrey Moser, Brown University

Mark Cladis, Brown University • "Racial and Environmental Justice in the Wild"

I explore the racial, environmental, and political implications of “the wild” in radical Romanticism. Typically, the wild is understood as that which is untouched by humans—as the pristine and the pure, as the strength of the Nation or the redemption of the solitaire. This idea of the wild has been broadly and justifiably critiqued. In my presentation: (1) I offer an alternative account of the wild as found in radical Romanticism, paying attention to its normative contributions to environmental and political justice; and (2) I explore this alternative account in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois. I present Du Bois’ notion of the wild as that which unsettles and condemns racist practices, including practices that exploit both black farmers and the land on which they work.

Katherine Behar, Baruch College, City University of New York • "What Makes Sense? Environmental Sensing and Nonhuman Sense"

This talk asks a senseless question, “What makes sense?” Could it be that what makes sense today, if only because who seems no longer up to the task of sense-making? In ubiquitous computing, nonhuman digital sensors dwarf the capacities and slash time frames of the human sensorium. Simply put, digital sensors might “make more sense” than we do. Deployed throughout contemporary environments, networked digital sensor arrays reproduce the extractive logics of conventional mining practices that also systematically harvest value from the earth. Yet, individually, sensors produce raw data as a function of their own isolated umvelts. Ironically, this aspect of nonhuman sense parallels a shift in human sense-making. While human sensibility turns from subject-oriented to object-oriented, the rise of intersectional data mining sequesters data production, amplifies minutia, and displaces sensible discourse.

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Moderator: Brian Lander, Brown University

Macarena Gómez-Barris, Pratt Institute • Disappearing Archipelagos

In this talk, I extend insights from The Extractive Zone (Duke University Press, 2017) to redefine the category of the disappeared. Thinking beyond the violent techniques of neoliberal modernity, I consider a longer arc of extractive colonialism. Exploratory scientific expeditions to Patagonia and British sheep colonization during the 19th and 20th centuries reveal the historical overlap between military occupation, monoculture, and the genocidal forced removal of Selk’nam Indigenous peoples. Thinking with Patricio Guzmán’s extraordinary eco-remapping of the nation-state in The Pearl Button (2014), I address how a Southern theory of the Pacific matters in relation to reorienting colonial geographies including the enclosure, terra nullius, and the concentration camp. How do submerged perspectives in the film and its archive and testimonies move us beyond the extractive view?

Astrida Neimanis, University of Sydney • 2067: The Sea and the Breathing

“When did we start taking on water? When had the air become so thin? We had kept trying to measure the anthropogenic ocean, but we failed to calculate that maelstrom of want that pulsed so hot and large beneath the waves…” In the mode of speculative nonfiction, this talk preimagines humanity’s dumped desires, archived in our near-future oceans. By throwing my voice into a speculative future, I also tentatively negotiate the ethics of learning from black and indigenous thought alongside (predominantly white) intersectional and queer environmental feminisms. If in 2018 this alongsideness feels in many ways impossible, I wonder whether time-travel offers any breathing room. I moreover wonder what this future-ocean might reveal not only about Anthropocenic scales of time and space, but also their ineffable scales of mattering.

Since the time of Vasco da Gama’s voyage, the Indian Ocean has been the theatre of intense rivalries over commodities and resources. For centuries the main players in these conflicts were Western colonial powers, but over the last few decades the countries of the Indian Ocean rim have themselves become major consumers of commodities and resources. As such they are among the principal drivers of anthropogenic climate change, an ongoing process that will have catastrophic consequences for the billions of people who live around the Indian Ocean. This presentation will explore the continuities between the resource conflicts of the past and future by focusing on two transformative wars: the Anglo-Dutch spice wars of the 17th century and the 1st Opium War of 1840–42.

The talk was presented as part of the OP Jindal Distinguished Lecture Series of the Center for Contemporary South Asia and introduced by Leela Gandhi. No video recording is available.

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Moderator: Iris Montero, Brown University

Kyle Powys Whyte, Michigan State University • Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Settler Fantasies

Contemporary articulations of the anthropocene in the media, politics, academia, and the sciences often portray dreaded futures of a climate change crisis that will produce ecological collapse with wide ranging harms on human societies. These dystopian futures erase the idea that for many Indigenous peoples, we are already living in times our ancestors would have considered dystopian. The presentation discusses the importance of Indigenous science fiction for the environmental humanities as a better direction for understanding climate altered futures.

Vera Candiani, Princeton University • The Costs of Environmental History: A View from Latin America

The institutionalization of Environmental History of Latin America is fairly recent. Following the models of the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) and the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH), the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Environmental History (SOLCHA) was founded in 2006. But the environmental perspective in Latin American history is not young at all. In fact, it has deep and old roots in the region's own ethnological and anthropological schools, in its way of doing "histoire totale" and of the longue durée, and in historical geography, all of which antecede the formation of both ASEH and ESEH. Yet, these roots are rarely acknowledged and tapped into among contemporary Latin American environmental history practitioners. This talk addresses three questions that emanate from this disjuncture. What are the challenges that Latin Americanist environmental historians have faced since the field was constructed and institutionalized after the North American and European models? What have been the costs and benefits of following these models? More generally, should we be (re)integrating the questions and approaches of the field of environmental history with the fundamental questions, concepts and methods of the discipline of history, and if so, why and how?

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Moderator: Claire Brault, Brown University

Stacy Alaimo, University of Texas at Arlington • Composing Blue Ecologies: Science, Aesthetics, and the Creatures of the Abyss

The ocean has long been seen as the quintessence of the exquisite, the sublime, and the surreal. As the environmental humanities looks toward the seas, the aesthetic becomes a vital mode of transmission and apprehension. Featuring images of deep sea creatures from the early and late 20th century, this talk traces the aesthetic as it moves across science, art, and popular culture. What would it mean to “compose” (Latour) blue ecologies without imposing a universalized perspective? Can the aesthetic of deep sea creatures catalyze publics, spark speculation, redistribute the sensible (Rancière), or otherwise broaden terrains of political concern? Finally, how does the aesthetic function in the abyssal Anthropocene—a strangely anachronistic space of discovery as well as an epistemologically fraught site for the compressed temporalities of extinction?

Bathsheba Demuth, Brown University • Whales, Whalers, and Thinking the Ocean through Cetacean Labor

Whales have been known by three distinct groups of hunters in the Bering Sea over the past two centuries: indigenous Yupik and Inupiaq whalers, capitalist commercial whalers, and communist industrial whalers. This talk examines how whales became known through the labor of their killing, examining the cosmologies these whaling practitioners composed around their bodies. What was a whale, and what was the Bering Sea, across the periods of time and methods of harvest? It then asks how we can think of the ocean as a space made not just by people and their ideas, but through the work of whales. It asks how we might narrate a history that examines animals as co-creators of environments through their labor, and what such a perspective might bring to our understanding of marine space and human relationships with the nonhuman world.

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Moderator: J. Timmons Roberts, Brown University

Dale Jamieson, New York University • Environmental Humanities: Problems and Prospects

In this talk I describe my journey through what has come to be called “the environmental humanities.” I discuss what I think is important about this emerging field, and identify some of the risks that may keep it from realizing its potential.

Gregory Cushman, University of Kansas • How to Make the Environmental Humanities Central to Teaching Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies from the Start: A Case Study

This presentation describes an innovative program undertaken by the Program in Environmental Studies at the University of Kansas, initiated in fall 2010 and aimed at providing students with a truly integrated, interdisciplinary, global perspective on environmental studies in co-taught introductory coursework. I briefly describe the underlying motivations, philosophy, and practices of core courses aimed at making the environmental humanities central to teaching and learning from the very start of students’ experience in the program. I detail challenges and emerging best practices from direct experience in teaching these courses as an environmental humanities scholar. Science and technology studies, the Anthropocene concept, the analysis of textual and visual representations, field experiences, and ethical concerns have proven especially fruitful in making the environmental humanities foundational to other aspects of environmental studies.