The Program for Public Scholarship is partnering with the Center for the Environment the Center for the Humanities, the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, and Science in the Public Square (funded by the Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures) to present Ecology Now!, a series of public events that will frame our relationship with the environment from new, unexpected perspectives.
This series invites us to consider our rapidly changing environment through the lenses of visual art, religion, public health, and cultural studies. All are welcome!
Santiago Sierra: 52 Canvases Exposed to Mexico City’s Air
February 23, 2024 – July 29, 2024
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
Artist Santiago Sierra created the 52 compositions—one for each week in a year—by placing adhesive-lacquered canvases on the floor in a building in Mexico City with the windows open, allowing the air to settle on them. Each week he removed one canvas and had a conservator permanently fix the sediment that had gathered on its surface. The result is a disturbing time-lapse of noxious accumulation. 52 Canvases Exposed to Mexico City’s Air refers not only to pollution in Mexico City but also to the increase of airborne contaminants in congested areas around the world.
Ursula Heise: Multispecies Justice and Narrative
February 27, 2024 @ 5 p.m.
Umrath Lounge
Presented by Science in the Public Square, a programmatic grant of the Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures
Join us for a talk from Ursula Heise, director of the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies, Institute of the Environment & Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. Multispecies Justice and Narrative explores the connection between struggles for social justice and environmental conservation. Multispecies justice, a new paradigm that has emerged over the last decade, has sought to expand environmental justice thinking beyond the boundaries of the human species by reconceptualizing who or what is considered a subject of justice, who is included in communities of justice, and how concepts of justice differ across cultural communities.
Culture and Environmental Crisis
February 28, 2024 @ 1 p.m.
Olin Library, Room 142
Presented by the Center for the Humanities
Patricia Olynyk (the Florence and Frank Bush Professor in Art, Sam Fox School) moderates a conversation on environmental humanities today between keynote speaker Nicole Seymour and Ursula Heise (the Marcia H. Howard Chair in Literary Studies Department of English and Institute of the Environment & Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles). All are welcome.
Nicole Seymour: In Defense of Tackiness: The Queer Environmental Politics of Glitter
February 28, 2024 @ 4 p.m.
Umrath Lounge
Presented by the Center for the Humanities
In this talk, Nicole Seymour will offer an environmental-cultural history of glitter, contextualizing and challenging the recent backlash against this substance, including the sweeping ban implemented by the European Union in 2023. Focusing on the tackiness of glitter — its physical stickiness as well as its metaphorical association with the vulgar — Seymour will chart how glitter has served as a rallying symbol for the marginalized: the working class, people of color and queer communities.
Toxic Sublime: Art and the Climate Crisis
March 20, 2024 @ 5:30 p.m.
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
Panel participants from a range of fields, including art history, environmental studies, engineering, and public health, gather to discuss how visual representations of environmental contamination function to encourage contemplation of the viewers’ position within a polluted world as well as the tensions that arise from such representations. Speakers include Ila Sheren, associate professor of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences and associate director for the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity; Suzanne Loui, lecturer in Environmental Studies in Arts & Sciences; and Jay Turner, head of the Division of Engineering Education, Vice Dean for Education, and James McKelvey Professor of Engineering Education.
Conevery Bolton Valencius: Fracking, Earthquakes, and Public Science
March 21, 2024 @ 3:30 p.m.
DUC 276
Presented by Science in the Public Square, a programmatic grant of the Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures
Join us for a talk from Conevery Bolton Valencius, professor of history at Boston College. Fracking, earthquakes, and public science will dig into the challenges that surround public discussion of science connecting earthquakes to oil and gas development. Economic and political pressures, scientific ways of talking about uncertainty and probability, and even alarmism related to past earthquakes have made it hard for local communities who have experienced earthquakes during the shale boom to figure out what was happening to them.
Public Workshop with Conevery Bolton Valencius
March 22, 2024 @ 11:30 a.m.
Busch Hall, Room 18
Presented by Science in the Public Square, a programmatic grant of the Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures
How to speak in Excel when you think in couplets: Climate change and the practical work of interdisciplinary collaboration.
Dr. Yuria Celidwen: Ethics of Belonging of Indigenous Contemplative Traditions
April 5, 2024 @ 11 a.m.
Brown Lounge, Brown Hall
Presented by the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies and Mindfulness Science & Practice, a multiyear cluster of the Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures
The unquestionable conditions of the crises of climate, health, and loneliness demand that we ask how education may lead to solutions. Dr. Yuria Celidwen will present on how Indigenous traditions hold critical and timely solutions to help meet our times’ most pressing social and environmental injustices through deep cultural roots of contemplative wisdom.
Timothy Morton: This Is Hell: It’s Not the End of the World
May 6, 2024 @ 5:30 p.m.
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
Co-sponsored by the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, the Center for the Environment, and the Center for the Humanities
Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University and director of the Cool America Foundation, will give a talk to celebrate the publication of their new book Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2024), which explores the relationship between religion and ecology in response to the climate crisis. After the talk, Morton will be available to sign copies of their books, which will be stocked at the Kemper bookshop.