Every other Tuesday at 4 PM in Maxwell Hall 222.
The Environmental Futures Reading Group meets biweekly and seeks to contend with the immediate and future implications of our current environmental state. This semester, we take our roadmap from the field of Wasteland Studies to building a strong community of thinkers interested in untangling (entangling?) essays, art, and theories on ruination, repair, and resilience.
Contact for this week's reading, to be added to the Canvas page, or for any more information on the group. Join us for coffee, snacks, and conversation!
Fridays at 2 PM; held both in-person and online.
A monthly graduate student gathering focused on workshopping pre-circulated article-length manuscripts, chapters, or papers focused on environmental issues from a range of humanistic disciplines. For more information or to be added to the Canvas page, contact Olivia Street (ostreett@iu.edu).
A Transatlantic Conversation on Theatre, Hesitation, and Possiblity
Gayle Karch Cook Center, September 13, 2024
PROGRAM:
1-3pm Workshop with IU Graduate Students
Nicole Rizzo, Climate Catastrophe: A Mad Ecocritical Perspective on Trauma Drama.
Katherine Pollock, Towards a Postanthropocentric Theater: An Investigation into Transformations of Theatrical Space.
Helen Gunn, "Again and again": The Potentialities of Dark Ruins in Abhishek Majumdar's The Djinns of Eidgah.
Katharina Schmid-Schmidsfelden, Chorus and the City.
Ahmed Tahsin Shams, The Evolution of Paratexts in the Anthropocene in Bengal’s Visual Arts: Imag(in)ing Climate Change.
4-7PM Lectures
4pm: Rebecca Schneider, Hold it! Theater at the End of the World.
This talk thinks through the end of Suzan Lori Parks' play Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World in which the full cast comes to the brink of the stage and chants: "Hold it! Hold it! Hold it! Hold it! Hold it! Hold it! Hold it!" The questions I raise in this talk are about elemental theatrical and mediatic moments in Parks's play and in Alberta Whittle's 2021 installation Hindsight is a Luxury You Can't Afford. Whittle's is a tidalectic project that works to "dream Otherways to refuse and resist," and locates its [hesitation] gesture in the overlapping interstices among Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Whittle's installation includes a film that gestures through Dionne Brand's Map to the Door of No Return and conjures (rather than represents) [black] congregation. I wonder whether negation, here, may be less interesting than hesitation. Interstice, gesture, and interinanimation might take the place of (or move laterally to) any clear demarcation between the so-called theatrical and the so-called real, so-called negation and so-called affirmation.
5pm: Ulrike Haß, Outside the Western Theater: A Chorus of Stones, for example, Rediscovered in Roger Rousseau’s ‘site minéral’ in Beauregard.
The greatest difficulty in speaking of the chorus is that the whole world agrees on what a chorus is, namely a group of people singing together. However, if we look at the period when the Greek polis was founded, we see something different. We see that the chorus is not an invention of the theater that was installed in the center of the poleis. It has two faces. Beneath the face that hears and sees the protagonist and responds to him, there is another face that is much more heterogeneous, linked to the landscapes from which the chorus has arrived to lament in the heart of the cities. This other face knows something of the fluid multiplicity of metamorphoses, it is familiar with relationships between human and non-human bodies which can no longer be described in terms of resonance or interchange. It knows something, especially important for Roger Rousseau here, of a material vitality shared by living beings of all kinds, things and matter. According to Jane Bennett, matter should be described in its vitality. But is this really a question of description, or is it not rather the matter of art?
Part of the Cultural Studies Series on "Plantary Futures"
6:30 pm at The Bishop Bar
Richard Grusin, Distinguished Professor Emerit of English at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and former Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies, writes: "In this lecture I will think about how contemporary science, technology, and culture are reimagining the role of trees and forests in shaping the future of humans, nonhumans, and the planet itself in the era of the Anthropocene, particularly in relation to deforestation, climate change, and biodiversity. My interest in thinking about arboreal futures is not only to think about what humans will do about trees, but more interestingly to think about what trees will do about humans, that is, to think about futurity in terms of arboreality, of what trees do for one another and the planet."
Part of the Cultural Studies Series on "Plantary Futures"
6:30 pm at The Bishop Bar
Stefanie Dunning, Associate Profesor of English at Miami University of Ohio, writes: "This essay undermines the tendency to view outer space as dead and empty by demonstrating that this category of thinking about the celestial elsewhere aligns with the Enlightenment split of man from nature articulated by Francis Bacon and others, who also theorized nature as inanimate and unalive in ways that ushered in the ethos of ecological destruction that has characterized Western society ever since. I suggest in this essay that the contemporary corporate space race is repetitionary of not only the ideology of the West relative to the natural world but that the consequences of such initiatives are likely to be destructive of the broader ecology—which, in my formulation includes outer space—in much the same way it has been on earth.
This fractured Enlightenment ecological illogic also structures our assumptions about what space travel is and how it can be accomplished; generally, we assume that an encounter with the celestial elsewhere can only be achieved through the mechanical—technology, rockets, propulsion engineering, and the like. In this essay, I consider the work of two black writers, Tade Thompson’s Rosewater (2016) and Octavia Butler’s Dawn (1987), whose imagined encounters with the celestial elsewhere are rooted in an organic encounter with living beings. In both texts, the ships used by the aliens are alive—not mechanical vessels whose intended goal is to get us to outer space and can only be understood as opposing life given the environmental devastation they entail—but are instead living beings themselves that symbiotically support life for “itself/themselves” and for any beings that live or travel within its/their body. Both Thompson and Butler’s conceptions of outer space rely upon an ethos that is antithetical to the machine-centered technological obsession of the West, which subverts the broader anti-nature orientation of the West and suggests that even in the context of space exploration and/or contact, Earthlings must alter both their understanding and relationship to the natural world, which includes, rather than excludes, outer space itself."
In this sequel to the 2008 Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning documentary Food, Inc., filmmakers Robert Kenner and Melissa Robledo reunite with investigative authors Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser to take a fresh look at our vulnerable food system. Q&A to follow.
Screening starts at 7pm at the IU Cinema.
About Food, Inc. 2:
The groundbreaking Oscar-nominated documentary Food, Inc. ignited a cultural conversation about the multinational corporations that control our food system at enormous cost to our planet, workforce and health. In the well-timed sequel, Food, Inc. 2 comes “back for seconds” to reveal how corporate consolidation has gone unchecked by our government, leaving us with a highly efficient yet shockingly vulnerable food system dedicated only towards increasing profits. [94 min; documentary; English]
A Q&A with Todd Wagner, co-founder of 2929 Entertainment and FoodFight USA, will follow the screening.
"This COVID-inspired sequel to 2008’s Oscar-nominated Food, Inc is essential viewing, and a persuasive argument for sweeping change in large-scale food production." — Liz Braun, Original Cin
"A provocative and vital wake-up call." — Avi Offer, NYC Movie Guru
"Food, Inc. 2 is a compelling, carefully constructed and complex documentary, a film that demands to be widely seen." — David Kaplan, Kaplan vs. Kaplan
Join the IU Department of History on Thursday, October 17, 2024, for its 37th annual Paul V. McNutt Lecture with Associate Professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago A. Naomi Paik. The talk will happen in the Tudor Room at the IMU from 7:30-10:00pm.
Professor Paik will participate in a moderated Q&A session and a reception with light refreshments will be served following her presentation.
Presentation Title: Sanctuary for None: Border Violence Against Migrants and Nature in the Sonoran Desert
Presentation Description: This talk examines migration through protected areas of the Sonoran Desert from the 1990s to the present. During this time of accelerating globalization and transnational migration, US border policy has pushed migrants to cross the southern border through the desert, often through protected areas (PAs) like the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge. In response conservationists and nationalists have cast migrants as “ecological others” who harm the natural landscape, and US state agencies have weaponized environmental protections to further criminalize migrants, as well as humanitarian volunteers working to prevent migrant death. And yet, while pitted against each other, the violence migrants and nature endure share the same root causes—US imperial policies that drive people to move long distance and US border regimes that then channel those migrants, and the anti-migrant enforcement that attempts to exclude them, into the desert. This shared source of harm means that the violence against migrants and the environment intertwine. By analyzing the layered histories of militarism, migration, border regimes, and conservation in the Sonoran Desert, this talk works to bring migrant and environmental justice together under the framework of abolitionist sanctuary that would provide refuge to all lives.
Have you ever considered writing about your environmental research or teaching in a more experiential or public-facing way? The format of this monthly gathering will be determined largely by its participants, but may include the discussion of strategies or models, workshopping short drafts by participants, and/or entering into conversation with invited writers.
For more information, or if you would like to participate but can’t attend this first meeting, contact me at sgayk@iu.edu. Light refreshments will be served, but please also feel free to bring your lunch for this informal introductory gathering.
The Writing Group will take place in Maxwell Hall 222 at noon on Friday, October 18th.
Part of the Cultural Studies Series on "Plantary Futures"
6:30 pm at The Bishop Bar
Larissa Lei is the author of nine books including The Lost Century, The Tiger Flu, Salt Fish Girl, and Iron Goddess of Mercy. Recipient of the Jim Duggins Novelist's Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Astraea Award, and the Otherwise Honor Book and she has also been a finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Governor General's Award. She has held a Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary, and a Maria Zambrano Fellowship at the University of Huelva and is currently the Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies; Professor, Canadian Studies & Department of English at the University of Toronto.
She will be giving the opening remarks to Bloomington Book Fest. More details coming soon!
The first in a series of three symposia on wastelands, this two-day event brings scholars of premodern literature and culture from IU and beyond into conversation about waste, wasting, and wastelands from the literature of the North Seas to Indigenous Mesoamerican art. Visiting speakers include Christopher Abram (Notre Dame), Georgia Henley (Saint Anselm College), Amy Mulligan (Notre Dame), and William Revere (UNC Asheville).
The second in a series of symposia on waste and wastelands will focus on historical approaches to under-mapped, overlooked, sacrificed, and restored landscapes around the world.
More details to come!
The Bloomington Symposia (TBS) gathers researchers and scholars, building upon the best cross-disciplinary thinking to promote the incubation of collaborative research inquiry. More a workshop than a conference, TBS plans to convene a short-term ‘working group,’ drawn primarily but not exclusively from across the IU campus, to focus on a key topic of mutual concern, and on the methodological, conceptual, and interpretive questions that emerge therefrom.
Faculty are welcome to contact the Institute at ias@indiana.edu with questions or suggested topics.
The focus of the Spring 2025 Bloomington Symposium is “Ecologies,” broadly construed. The study of ecologies invites us to bring together a diverse array of disciplines, fields, and perspectives: biological, environmental, climate, and earth sciences, art and design, geography, history, anthropology, religious studies, rhetoric, literature, music and performance, law and political science, as well as public health, policy studies, international affairs, media studies, and journalism.
A word once primarily associated with the biological sciences, “ecology” comes from the Greek, “oikos,” meaning family, home, or dwelling, and now is used in many fields to frame considerations of ecosystemic relationships–including interspecies entanglements, networks, mutualism, reciprocity, and antagonism. We invite proposals that consider an aspect of “ecologies” from a particular disciplinary perspective but are open to interdisciplinary conversation on their topic. Participants will be selected from as diverse a range of disciplines as possible. Proposals might be inspired by work on community and ecosystem ecology, environmental resilience, emplacement and environment, ideas of dwelling and home, aesthetic engagements with ecologies, the often precarious ecosystems in which we and other beings dwell, sustainable business and agriculture. We particularly invite proposals that consider how human cultural institutions (including ideas, values and beliefs) and cultural productions shape and are shaped by the more-than-human world: How do we understand or represent the changing ecosystems that we both inhabit and are? What might the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities be able to teach each other about sustainable ecologies in the anthropocene? In posing such questions, the symposium aims to expand theoretical frameworks beyond siloed disciplines and take a capacious understanding of what “ecology” means.
This workshop group is co-convened by:
Shannon Gayk, Associate Professor, English & Environmental Humanities
Jennifer Lau, Professor, Biology
Proposals will be due in late February.