February 23, 2021 Vol 4
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!
|
|
|
|
|
|
February 24, 12:30pm |
|
Working Wednesdays: Feedback session for Climate Storytelling Workshop
|
|
PPEH Grad Fellows, please join us for our Working Wednesdays feedback session with PPEH's Climate Story team. This team is committed to training others in the greater Philadelphia region and beyond both to write their own climate stories and to learn to host climate workshops for their schools and organizations.
To learn more about this initiative, please visit the
My Climate Story experiment page. |
|
|
March 3, 12:30pm |
|
Working Wednesdays: Thinking Extraction through Relation with Dr. Rebecca Macklin |
|
PPEH Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Rebecca Macklin will share an outline of her new research project, which focuses on the cultural resonance of the extractive industries in contemporary Indigenous cultural narratives. This project employs an ethic of relationality to understand the ways that extracted resources -- in their various stages of movement, production, and consumption -- exist in relation to surrounding landscapes, bodies, and ecosystems. This talk will draw on recent Indigenous North American cultural texts, including the 2017 video game Thunderbird Strike by the Irish and Anishinaabe/Métis artist Elizabeth LaPensée. Information and registration here!
|
|
|
|
|
Need to freshen up your nightstand library? Been meaning to connect with your colleagues about what is informing their research? Here we present the what and why of our grad fellows' bookshelves!
|
|
|
|
Danny Cooper |
|
A book I'm currently reading (that I also think pairs well with our My Climate Story project) is World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. The book is told in vignettes of different species the author has turned to for guidance throughout her life. The book is filled with love and respect for the creatures we share the Earth with. Through each story Nezhukumatathil gives these species voices to share their stories while also sharing what she's learned from them and what the reader can learn from them - something I strive to emulate through my work at PPEH - especially in the Beyond Humans climate stories I've written.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Sherif H. Ismail |
|
My title is The Last Neanderthal, a novel by Canadian author Claire Cameron. It is a new and corrective representation of the Neanderhals, based on recent scientific findings. It invites us not only to identify or sympathize with the Neanderhals but also to learn from them and how they related to other species and forms of life around them
|
|
|
|
|
|
Davy Knittle |
|
The book I'm thinking with currently is Katherine McKittrick's Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2021). As McKittrick notes in the introduction, "I share Dear Science not as a project that describes science, particularly black science, through (or as) scientific racism, but as a study of how we come to know black life through asymmetrically connected knowledge systems"(3). Anyone interested in climate storytelling or more general orientations to storytelling as a tool of environmental justice might resonate with McKittrick's assertion via Sylvia Winter that "we are a 'storytelling species'" (9) and her thinking about science, narrative, and race.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Pooja Nayak |
|
I've been poring over the dense and colorful collage profusions in Lynda Barry's What it is, which is interspersed with notes, sketches, moving details from Barry's creative writing journey, and instructions for visual and writing exercises on yellow legal pad pages. The visuality of the book and questions such as 'What is an Image?', 'What is a Memory?' or 'What Happens When We Read A Story?', for instance, make for multiple fun and thoughtful entry points into form, memory, reading, and writing.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Our My Climate Story team has been hard at work offering workshops and trainings, and gathering important and personal stories of the climate emergency. Sharing these stories help us to understand more about not only where climate change is happening, but how it makes us feel, and help us process these emotions that live at our core. Each week, PPEH intern Danny Cooper is adding another beautiful dimension to these stories with @My_Climate_Story on Instagram! Follow and share with your friends and family -- and perhaps learn new and impactful things about each other.
|
|
|
|
COMMUNITY OPPORTUNITY BOARD |
|
|
|
|
|
The Philadelphia Area Environmental Justice Curriculum Hub is a living archive of resources of environmental justice advocacy in and around Philadelphia. The Hub welcomes students, advocates, educators, and artists to contribute any curricular materials, writing, film, interviews, oral histories, and art in the pursuit of racial and environmental justice in the Philadelphia area. More info here.
|
|
|
The Schuylkill Center is currently seeking an Environmental Art Intern for their spring/early summer programs. They are looking for an open-minded creative and thinker who has the ability to work on diverse tasks related to this art program. Please see a description of the call in the following link. Deadline is extended through March 1, 2021.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Call for proposals for an interdisciplinary grad student conference in March 2021. The conference centers around the ethnographic concept of placing. They invite papers that critically engage with topics such as: waterscapes, excess, pollution and toxicity, post-colonial/decolonial STS, late industrialism, human-animal and interspecies relations, climate change, racialized geographies, multimodality. More information here.
|
|
|
Haverford College: The virtual summit “Educating for a Just Ecological Transition: Building Higher Educational Alliances in a Time of Climate Crisis” engages emerging responses to the climate crisis in higher education—with particular attention to the roles higher education institutions can play in building alliances with social movements, community organizations, artists, intellectuals, and informal educational structures. Information here.
|
|
|
|
|
This semester Penn's Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies department is offering rich programming for their year of Environmental Feminisms-- more information and registration here!
Beyond Survival: Eco-Feminist Imaginings in Precarious Times Conference Feb 23-26th Cindy Wiesner keynote, February 23rd Kim TallBear keynote, February 25th Jeremy Dutcher performance Sophie Lewis, Gender & Eco Catastrophe symposium, February 26th
Tropical Sacrifice Book launch with Lucas de Lima with guest poet Adjua Greaves, March 30th
Carmina Escobar Interactive Cabaret with breathing instrumentality demonstration by PPEH Dissertation Fellow Andrew Niess, March 18th
Gender, Crisis, Environment GSWS grad/undergrad symposium, April 8th & 9th
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Inhabited Sea is a research collaborative that seeks to reimagine Mumbai from its sodden grounds. Their second public seminar, Sea-ing the City, shares the results of three projects, and will take place on Wednesday, February 24. More info here.
|
|
|
|
Read! Dr. Max Cavitch, Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, presents their public-science article A Solitary Executioner Clownfrog Wants You To Know She Exists, in the Journal of Wild Culture.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Tony Leiserowitz (Director, Yale Program on Climate Communication) invites you to view Meltdown, a new documentary featuring Tony together with photographer Lynn Davis, shot on location in Greenland, and directed and produced by Academy Award nominees Fred Golding and Mike Tollin.
|
|
|
|
Event! Thursday, 2/5, 3pm A panel and conversation celebrating the publication of Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press) with its editors Carolyn Fornoff, and Patricia Eunji Kim, and Bethany Wiggin. Organized by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Register here.
|
|
|
|
|
Lucille Clifton |
|
cutting greens
|
|
curling them around i hold their bodies in obscene embrace thinking of everything but kinship. collards and kale strain against each strange other away from my kissmaking hand and the iron bedpot. the pot is black, the cutting board is black, my hand, and just for a minute the greens roll black under the knife, and the kitchen twists dark on its spine and I taste in my natural appetite the bond of live things everywhere.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Share |
|
this digest with your colleagues and networks, and sign up for the mailing list here!
|
Check |
|
for confirmed upcoming events and don't forget to submit yours to the digest!
|
Follow |
|
us on social media and don't forget to tag us in your highlights!
|
|
|
|
|
|