Category Archives: environment

Poetry as Protest

Facing Climate Change with Community and Activism

Announcing a new group of the Humanities Lab for students, staff, and faculty to discuss nature and ecopoetry and to plan climate crisis activism in D.C.

Organized by Professor Linda Voris, the group meets the first Wednesday of each month, 4-5:30 p.m. in 228 Battelle-Thompkins.

There will be snacks. All are welcome!

Bring a poem concerning nature or climate change if you like!

Meetings for Fall 2023

  • Wed. October 4, 2023, 4-5:30pm at 228 Battelle-Tompkins

More than 20 people attended our first meeting, including undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff at AU. We set our agenda and ideas for the group, read poetry related to nature that members brought, and discussed possible actions for the future.


Next meeting:

  • Wed. November 1, 2023, 4-5:30 pm at 228 Battelle-Tompkins

Come hear our guest speaker! Professor Dana R. Fisher is the Director of AU’s Center for Environment, Community, & Equity (CECE) and a Professor in SIS.  Professor Fisher will talk about CECE initiatives, her research on climate crisis activism, and her forthcoming book, Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.

Please RSVP for this meeting here: https://forms.gle/atDy4fGeu1PKdrDYA


  • Wed. December 6, 2023, 4-5:30 pm at 228 Battelle-Tompkins

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Sin Nombre

How can we understand the experiences of people whose lives have become radically displaced or deterritorialized?In this lecture, Professor Ricardo Ortiz discusses displacement in the film Sin Nombre.


Fables of De-Patriation: Undocumented Others in Cary Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre

Ricardo Ortiz
Wednesday March 25, 2014, 3 p.m.
Battelle-Tompkins 228

About our speaker

Ricardo Ortiz is associate professor of US Latino Literature and Culture at Georgetown University. His work focuses on hemispheric, transnational “Américas” Studies, cultural studies, and race, gender and queer theory. For this talk, he discusses the representation of migration and violence in the film Sin Nombre (Cary Fukunaga, 2009), which follows illegal immigrants and escaping gang members on the dangerous train journey from Honduras, through Mexico, to the United States. Combining fictional and documentary elements, and filming in real locations with real people, the film becomes an emotional testament of migration and displacement. A film screening will be scheduled for early March.

Sin Nombre 

Sin Nombre is a film directed by Cary Fukunaga, featuring the character(s) Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), a Honduran teen, hungers for a better life. Her chance for one comes when she is reunited with her long-estranged father, who intends to emigrate to Mexico and then enter the United States. Sayra’s life collides with a pair of Mexican gangmembers (Edgar Flores, Kristyan Ferrer) who have boarded the same American-bound train.

 

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Geocaching

How do we transform the landscape around us through stories, images, memories, and experiences? Join us for a lecture by David Pike on new urban geographies.


Geocaching: An Interdisciplinary Community Project

Wednesday, February 11th, 2014

12 p.m.
Battelle-Tompkins 228

 

 

 

 

For this project Professor Pike is introducing the AU community to geocaching, a collaborative project that connects physical and virtual space. Using mobile apps and maps, students from participating classes will “seed” the American University campus and other locations in the DC area with geocaches, and invite the community to find and respond to these hidden treasure troves. In addition to physical artifacts, historical materials, and clues for more interaction, geocaches will include stories, poems, and artwork, and elements that are real, imaginary, past, or lost. After the introductory lecture and workshop, follow-up events will extend this project throughout the semester— with the participation of graduate and undergraduate students and faculty from multiple departments and programs including literature, public history, world languages and cultures, art history, creative writing, arts management, college writing, film and visual media, philosophy and religion, graphic design, and computer science.

 

 


About our speaker:

 Geocachingtalk2Feb2015300x3003David Pike is a professor of literature at American University, and the author of major books in urban studies, modernism, cinema, and comparative literature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Car Culture in Africa

Join us for a lecture by Professor Lindsey Green-Simms (Department of Literature, American University) on how luxury cars and car culture inform notions of cultural and social mobility  in Africa.


Cruising the Petro-state:  Car Culture and Nigerian Cinema

Wednesday November 2, 2016, 1 pm, at 228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

 

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This talk examines car culture and the status of the private automobile in post oil-boom Nigeria by reading popular video films that are a part of the now-famous “Nollywood” industry.  In particular, it will discuss how luxury cars like the Hummer or Mercedes Benz are paradigmatic and contradictory objects through which one can assess both the pleasures and anxieties of global modernity in Nigeria.  Though these cars are highly coveted objects, typically filmed driving down paved roads in posh neighborhoods, they are often a sign of wealth that is acquired through criminality, witchcraft, magic, or fraud.  Any discussion of car culture therefore requires an engagement with the complexities of the moral economy of Nigeria and assessment of what it means to be a capitalist consumer in a highly stratified oil-producing country.

 

 


About our speaker

Green-Simms-Lindsey-300Lindsey Green-Simms’ teaching and research focuses on African and post-colonial film and literature. Her particular interests include globalization, technology, gender and sexuality studies, and Nollywood video-film production. Professor Green-Simms’ forthcoming book, Postcolonial Automobility: Cars, Cultural Production, and Global Mobility in West Africa, examines how the contradictions of globalization are embedded in the commodity of the automobile and in the ideals of automobility. She is also working on a second book, provisionally titled Unbelonging Bodies: Same-Sex Sexualities and African Screen Media. Professor Green-Simms completed her doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, and has previously taught at Duke University, where she was a postdoctoral fellow in Women’s Studies, as well as at the College of Charleston. She has published articles in Camera Obscura, transition, Journal of African Cinemas, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing and has book chapters in Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century (Ohio U. Press) and Indiscretions: At the Intersection of Queer and Postcolonial Theory (Rodopi Press).

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Read more:

Lindsey Green-Simms, “Hustlers, Homewreckers, and Homoeroticism: Nollywood’s Beautiful Faces”
PDF: Hustlers_Homewreckers_and_Homoeroticism
Lindsey Green-Simms, “Occult Melodramas: Spectral Affect and West African Video-Film”
PDF: Occult_Melodramas_Spectral_Affect_and_W


 

Understanding Fuel

What can critical theory, literature, and film help us understand about fuel?

Join us for a lecture by Professor Karen Pinkus (Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University) on the concept of “fuel” in western culture and philosophy, and the ways in which our understanding of energy has structured modernity.


Fuel: History of a Strange Concept

Monday September 26, 2016, 1 pm at 228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

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In this talk, professor Pinkus will discuss the concept of fuel in human culture and philosophy, from antiquity to the present day.
Part of her new book, Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), the talk examines different types of fuel, from everyday fossil and renewable fuels to fantastical fuels found in science fiction and speculative literature. This work was inspired by professor Pinkus’ concern about the environment, and her sense that that the humanities can bring a critical research component to solving the problems of climate change.
Pinkus uses tools from the humanities, such as critical theory, philosophy, and literary analysis, to separate fuel from energy, and to examine our relationship with fuel itself. Is fuel a form of pure potentiality, that is, power, but before it is used (up)?  She proposes that fuels are materials that have “very complex relationships with our own thought structures, fantasies, narratives, or ways of being in the world.”

 

Cultures of Energycultural-histroy-of-climate-changeFind out more:

Listen to a podcast about her work on Cultures of Energy, where she talks about Jules Verne as her greatest inspiration, her new research on geoengineering, and why the future belongs to small people.

Read an article she recently published in the new collection The Cultural History of Climate Change, titled “Fuels and humans, bíos and zoe”

Read and download the PDF here: pinkusculturalhistory

 

 


About our speaker

pinkusKaren Pinkus is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Cornell University.  She is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, and a member of the Climate Change Focus Group. She has published many articles on topics ranging from literary theory and the internal combustion engine to the temporality of carbon management. Professor Pinkus has published widely in Italian culture, literary theory, cinema, visual theory, and environmental theory.  Aside from Italian she also works with French, Latin, German, Spanish, and is learning Swedish.

She has several ongoing research projects:
1) a new book tentatively titled Autonomia/ Automata: Machines for Writing, Laboring and Thinking in 1960s Italy, that explores issues around labor, automation and repetition in Italian art, literature, design, and film of the 60s.  In part, this work is in dialogue with contemporary Italian thought, especially as regards the question of the Autonomia movement, the refusal to work, and the question of wages.

2) Her new book Fuel (November 2016) thinks about issues crucial to climate change by arguing for a separation of fuel (perhaps understood as potentiality, or dynamis, to use the Aristotelian term) from energy as a system of power (actuality, use).  Fuel follows a series of literary, filmic, and critical texts through the form of a dictionary (from “air” to “zyklon D”).  Fuel engages with literature, art and critical theory as they are central to analogy and in turn, to fuel itself.

For about the past ten years, most of her work has been directed toward thinking about the humanities in relation to climate change. Professor Pinkus is on the editorial boards of diacritics and World Picture Journal. For diacritics, she edited a special issue on climate change criticism (43.1), thirty years on from the influential issue on nuclear criticism.

You can find out more about Karen Pinkus on her website

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Have a look at Karen Pinkus’ books:

pid_16330How can we account, in a rigorous way, for alchemy’s ubiquity? We think of alchemy as the transformation of a base material (usually lead) into gold, but “alchemy” is a word in wide circulation in everyday life, often called upon to fulfill a metaphoric duty as the magical transformation of materials. Almost every culture and time has had some form of alchemy. This book looks at alchemy, not at any one particular instance along the historical timeline, not as a practice or theory, not as a mode of redemption, but as a theoretical problem, linked to real gold and real production in the world. What emerges as the least common denominator or “intensive property” of alchemy is ambivalence, the impossible and paradoxical coexistence of two incompatible elements. Alchemical Mercury moves from antiquity, through the golden age of alchemy in the Dutch seventeenth century, to conceptual art, to alternative fuels, stopping to think with writers such as Dante, Goethe, Hoffmann, the Grimm Brothers, George Eliot, and Marx. Eclectic and wide-ranging, this is the first study to consider alchemy in relation to literary and visual theory in a comprehensive way.

51PW1EWHY7L._SX388_BO1,204,203,200_Early on a windy morning in April 1953, the body of a young woman washed up on a beach outside of Rome. Her name was Wilma Montesi, and, as the papers reported, she had left her home in the city center a day earlier, alone. The police called her death an accidental drowning. But the public was not convinced. In the cafés around the Via Veneto, people began to speak-of the son of a powerful politician, lavish parties, movie stars, orgies, drugs.

How this news item of everyday life exploded into one of the greatest scandals of a modern democracy is the story Karen Pinkus tells in The Montesi Scandal. Wilma’s death brought to the surface every simmering element of Italian culture: bitter aspiring actresses, corrupt politicians, nervous Jesuits in sunglasses, jaded princes. Italians of all types lined up to testify-in court or to journalists of varying legitimacy-about the death of the middle-class carpenter’s daughter, in the process creating a media frenzy and the modern culture of celebrity. Witnesses sold their stories to the tabloids, only to retract them. They posed for pictures, pretending to shun the spotlight. And they in turn became celebrities in their own right.

Pinkus takes us through the alleys and entryways of Rome in the 1950s, linking Wilma’s death to the beginnings of the dolce vita, now synonymous with modern Roman life. Pinkus follows the first paparazzi on their scooters as they shoot the protagonists and gives us an insider’s view of the stories and trials that came to surround this lonely figure that washed up on the shores of Ostia. Full of the magnificent paparazzi photos of the protagonists in the drama and film stills from the era’s landmark movies, The Montesi Scandal joins true crime with “high” culture in an original form, one true to both the period and the cinematic conception of life it created. More than a meditation of the intricate ties among movies, paparazzo photography, and Italian culture, The Montesi Scandal narrates Wilma’s story and its characters as the notes for an unrealized film, but one that, as the reader discovers, seems impossible to produce.

 

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Profane Energies / Sacred Narratives

How does religious thought inform and affect environmentalist activism? Join us for a lecture by Evan Berry (Department of Philosophy and Religion, American University), on the role of faith traditions in framing debates about climate change.


Profane Energies/Sacred Narratives

                 On Religion and Environmentalism

Wednesday February 15, 2017,  1 pm at 228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

In the run up to COP21, the international convening that produced the Paris Agreement on climate change, religious leaders and indigenous communities were important contributors in framing a global moral call to action. Yet hardly one year later, climate politics again seem intractable; many religious groups, especially here in the United States, remain skeptical about climate science. In this talk, professor Berry draws from his work on  the relationship between nature and religious thought in order to elucidate recent cultural and political debates.

 


About our speaker

Evan Berry is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at American University and Co-Director of the Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs master’s program. His research examines the intersections among religion, globalization, and climate change, and seeks to advance knowledge about the role of religious actors in contemporary environmental controversy. Beginning with the premise that religion and religious ideas serve to locate human beings in the natural order, his scholarship concentrates on the cultural particularities of environmental ethics—the ways that different religious perspectives generate divergent ecological orientations. Pursuing these questions through both ethnographic research and philosophical reflection, his current work includes a study of religious civil society groups actively engaged with the challenge of climate change. His book, Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism, was recently published by the University of California Press.

 

 

 

 

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Screen Shot 2016-06-26 at 10.03.33 AMEvan Berry’s recent book, Devoted to Nature, explores the religious underpinnings of American environmentalism, tracing the theological character of American environmental thought from its Romantic foundations to contemporary nature spirituality. During the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, religious sources were central to the formation of the American environmental imagination, shaping ideas about the natural world, establishing practices of engagement with environments and landscapes, and generating new modes of social and political interaction. Building on the work of seminal environmental historians who acknowledge the environmental movement’s religious roots, Evan Berry offers a potent theoretical corrective to the narrative that explained the presence of religious elements in the movement well into the twentieth century. In particular, Berry argues that an explicitly Christian understanding of salvation underlies the movement’s orientation toward the natural world. Theologically derived concepts of salvation, redemption, and spiritual progress have not only provided the basic context for Americans’ passion for nature but have also established the horizons of possibility within the national environmental imagination.

 

 

Follow Evan Berry:   @ecothought

The Global Environmental Crisis

Grass_closeupIn this talk, Professor Paul Wapner,  from the Environmental Politics Program at the School of International Services at American University, will examine the relationship between crisis and response in reference to the global environmental crisis. Should the world adopt a politics of crisis to address global environmental challenges?

 


The Global Environmental Crisis 

Wednesday March 23rd, 2016, 1 pm, at 228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

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For decades, environmentalists have been sounding the alarm about the environmental “crisis.”  They warn that the earth’s ecosystems are in acute danger and that injustices abound as people exploit each other through the medium of nature.  How useful is the concept of “crisis” to describe environmental degradation?  It is certainly the case that climate change, freshwater scarcity, loss of biological diversity, and other factors are undermining the planet’s life-support systems, and that untold numbers of people and creatures are affected.  But does labeling these phenomena as a “crisis” help or hinder humanity’s ability to respond?  In this talk, Professor Paul Wapner will examine the relationship between crisis and response.  Should the world adopt a politics of crisis to address global environmental challenges?

 


 About our speaker

Paul WapnProfessor Paul Wapner’s research focuses on global environmental politics, environmental thought, transnational environmental activism, and environmental ethics. He is particularly concerned with understanding how societies can live through this historical moment of environmental intensification in ways that enhance human dignity, compassion, and justice, and come to respect and nurture the more-than-human world. His books include: Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics, Principled World Politics: The Challenge of Normative International Relations, Living Through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism, and, most recently, Global Environmental Politics: From Person to Planet (co-edited with Simon Nicholson). He is currently editing a book titled, Reimagining Climate Change, and continues to lead workshops for professors that explore contemplative practices and environmental engagement.

 

Click on the images below to find out more about Paul Wapner’s books.

 

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The Crisis in Fukushima

How do we understand the impact and aftermath of natural disasters?  As part of our series of events on Crisis Narratives, we are delighted to welcome Celine-Marie Pascale, professor of Sociology at American University.


Vernacular Epistemologies of Risk: The Crisis in Fukushima

Wednesday, October 14, 1 pm at 228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

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On March 11, 2011 a major earthquake hit the coast of Japan. With a magnitude of 9.0  and an epicenter off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku, this was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, and the fourth most powerful earthquake in the world since the advent of modern recording methods in 1900. More than 15,000 people died, hundreds of thousands were displaced, and millions of households were left without electricity or water.
The earthquake triggered tsunami waves that reached 40 meters (133 feet) in height in some areas and were even deadlier and more destructive than the earthquake. In addition to flooding and destroying major coastal areas in Japan, the tsunami caused the level 7 meltdown of three nuclear reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex.
What do you know about the nuclear disaster at Fukushima? Media hold unprecedented capacity to frame the presence and meaning of disasters, particularly where global risks are concerned. For this talk, Celine-Marie Pascale, professor of Sociology and expert in the fields of epistemology and language, examines the production of U.S. media discourses regarding the public health risks posed by the massive nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant. Based on analysis of over 2100 media accounts, she illustrates how media discourses created vernacular epistemologies that constituted not only particular kinds of knowledge but also particular kinds of global citizens.
The earthquake and tsunami events, commonly known in Japan as “3/11,” caused dramatic transformations to the natural, built, and social environments. But as professor Pascale discusses in this project, there were also epistemic changes arising from this disaster that are less obvious but perhaps no less profound in their consequences.  Her study is based on a textual analysis of all articles published between March 11, 2011 and March 11, 2013 about the Fukushima disaster in four of the most prominent media outlets in the United States: the Washington Post and The New York Times and two nationally prominent blogs, Politico and The Huffington Post.  This analysis will illustrate how systematic media practices minimized the presence of health risks, contributed to misinformation, and exacerbated uncertainties.  The discourses of risk in media provided a very particular vernacular epistemology for risk assessment, both now and in the future.  Through dominant reporting practices, media did not just shape perceptions of the Fukushima disaster, they provided heuristics—a vernacular epistemology— through which the importance and risk of nuclear radiation is to be understood.

Celine-Marie-Pascale-140620bTo find about more about professor Pascale’s research, click here.


The Great East Japan Earthquake

A brief overview of the earthquake.

Click here to read the Wikipedia entry for the 2011 earthquake in Japan.

2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami

Click here to read a brief overview on LiveScience

Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011


2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami

2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake_-_affected_countriesOn December 26, 2004 a major earthquake occurred off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. Known as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake  or as the Sumatra–Andaman earthquake, this undersea earthquake was the 3rd largest earthquake ever recorded, with a magnitude of 9.1 to 9.3, and lasted between 8 and 10 minutes. Killing more than 230,000 people in 14 countries, this is one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. The series of tsunamis that followed the earthquake  reached up to 30 meters in height (100 feet). Indonesia was the hardest-hit country, followed by Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand.

Read more about this earthquake and its aftermath on Wikipedia:

2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami

main_1200A photo essay in The Atlantic Monthly by Alan Taylor,  reporting on the 10 year anniversary of the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami:

Ten Years Since the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami

From BBC News, a report on rebuilding the communities destroyed by the tsunami:

Indian Ocean Tsunami: Then and Now


How Tsunamis Work

Infographics:

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Screen Shot 2015-08-22 at 5.57.46 PM An animated TED lecture about what causes tsunamis