June 26, 2021  Vol 11

Welcome to The Understory, PPEH's bi-weekly environmental humanities digest! In a world of continued remote engagement, we're growing a digital community space to feature work in EH, share information, and most importantly, to expand conversation in all areas of the environmental humanities. Please feel welcome to contribute your events, related work, and recommendations by emailing Angela at faranda@sas.upenn.edu!

Area of Interest: Former Sunoco/PES Refinery Site Billboard
On view westbound 76 at Wharton Street through June 28, 2021

This artwork developed out of a PPEH workshop led by artist-in-residence Amy Balkin, which posed the question: What can speculative archiving and memorialization offer in response to crises of industrial pollution? The workshop invited participants to develop proposals for archives and memorials as a form of “rapid response speculation.” Community experts Mr. Charles and Mrs. Tammy Reeves, Grays Ferry residents and representatives of the Tasker-Morris Neighbors Association and Resident Action Committee 2 (RAC2), presented at this workshop and collaborated with Amy Balkin on this subsequent public art engagement. Mr. Reeves shares his hopes for Balkin’s artistic intervention: that the billboard will “make more people aware of what the refinery was and how it affected our community.” He wishes it might provoke the creation of “a memorial on the land”. To read more about this project, please visit the companion website at www.areaofinterest.org.

We are delighted to welcome Mary and Faye to our team and are so pleased to introduce them to you! Their work through this internship will connect, create, and support PPEH's forthcoming experiments and projects on our digital channels. Here, Mary and Faye share some recommendations for summer enjoyment:

"The Arts of Noticing" series, edited by PPEH Graduate Fellow Pooja Nayak, a doctoral candidate in Anthropology and South Asia Studies at Penn

Interleaving Ways of Knowing a Prairie: Drawing, Data, and Plants

This piece by Liz Anna Kozik, a PhD candidate at the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison, runs an experiment for the reader: what aspects of the Mesic prairie histories, remnants, and their restorations become visible when the same dataset is presented through a formal, journal style abstract, and then explored through drawing?

On Dispossessed Time and Its Suspension

Our final post is by Larissa A. Johnson, a multimodal maker and Ph.D. candidate in Music and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, in which she reads 'having/making time' as a condition for 'being free', and reflects on how the audio-visual form helps her share these counter-representations of rest and play as attempts at "humanness where it is not readily given". 

See more stories @My_Climate_Story on Instagram

• Emergence/y, remote conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE). 7/26-8/6 
• Streams, remote conference, hosted by KTH Stockholm, 8/3-8/7.  The purpose of STREAMS is to reflect strands of practices and philosophies within the Environmental Humanities. At the same time it is also an invitation to see how the streams diverge, merge, or new ones emerge over time.
  
• Water Politics in the Age of the Anthropocene, Local scholars and activists as well as international experts will develop and convene these seminars exploring novel, collaborative, and exploratory epistemological practices and modes of acting upon the urgencies of the Anthropocene. October 11-16, 2021

Position Available: The Environmental Collaboratory: Executive Director

The aim of “The Collaboratory” is to capitalize on the expertise in environmental science, engineering, law, health, policy, and humanities that exist at Drexel University and the Academy of Natural Sciences, to work with communities, corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies to both identify regional environmental issues and address them impactfully, equitably and together. Read more about the Executive Director position here.