President's Dream Colloquium on Creative Ecologies

In recent decades, the field of Environmental Humanities has emerged in recognition of the impossibility of relying on any one system or culture of knowledge to save the world. Integrating ecological inquiry from the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts, the field has also insisted not only on the dismantling of all nature/culture divides but on the dismantling of hierarchies between Western, Eastern, and Indigenous ways of knowing and relating. Taking this kind of intervention as its starting point, Creative Ecologies asks how art, philosophy, and decolonizing methodologies might help us to connect more intimately and imaginatively to the disaster of the present. Through a series of public lectures and seminar meetings we will explore together “the dimensions of life that have been anaesthetized, massacred, and dishonoured in the name of a progress that is reduced today to the imperative of economic growth” (Isabelle Stengers). We will use the lectures and seminars to cultivate a renewed sense of curiosity about the world, to learn the art of noticing what we were blind to, and to foster a sense of activity and possibility.

The invited speakers will propose productive alternatives to apocalyptic thinking (Clare Colebrook); cultivating deep listening (Candice Hopkins); Indigenous and anthropological methods for “knowing from the inside” (Elizabeth Povinelli and Tim Ingold); studying the earth’s material witnessing (Susan Schuppli); and building new worlds through an Indigenous understanding of deep time (Leanne Simpson and Amanda Strong).

Required and recommended reading will be available on Canvas as pdfs. Please print these out and bring them with you to discuss in class.

• Bird Rose, Deborah. “Shimmer: When All You Love Is Being Trashed,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, ed. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather, Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. G51-63.
• Ursula K. Heise. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. (excerpts)
• Stengers, Isabelle. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Open Humanities Press, 2015, pp. 7-25.

Recommended:

• Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London: Athlone, 2000.

Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, 2018, (26.29 mins.) and Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams, 2016 (28 mins.). Conceived and realized by the Karrabing Film Collective; directed by Elizabeth Povinelli

• Povinelli, Elizabeth. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. (excerpts)
• Coleman, Mathew and Yusoff, Kathryn. “An Interview with Elizabeth Povinelli: Geontopower, Biopolitics and the Anthropocene.” Theory, Culture & Society 34, 2-3, (2017): 169–185.

Recommended:

• Povinelli, Elizabeth. “Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science,” In The Kinship of Tides. Stefanie Hessler, ed. MIT Press, 2019.

Speaker: Elizabeth Povinelli
Frans Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University

The Sustainability of Everything

Speaker: Tim Ingold
Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen

• Ingold, Tim. “One world anthropology,” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8, 1/2, (2018): 158–171.
• Escobar, Arturo. “Sustainability: design for the pluriverse”, Development 54, 2 (2011): 137-40.
• Ingold, Tim. “Designing environments for life.” In Anthropology and Nature, ed. Kirsten Hastrup. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013, pp. 233-246.

Recommended:

• Ingold, Tim. “Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived through the Feet,” Journal of Material Culture, 9, 3 (2004): pp. 315-340.

• Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Indigenous Americas. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. (excerpts)
• Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. This Accident of Being Lost: Songs and Stories. 2017. (excerpts)

TBA

The making of "Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes)"

Speaker: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Michi Saaglig Mishnaabeg writer, scholar and activist

Special Guests: Amanda Strong, Bracken Hanuse Corlett, and Whess Harman

• Simpson will screen the animated film: Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes), 2018 (19:00), based on a story by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and directed by Amanda Strong.

What would you do (and who would you kill) in order to save the world?

Speaker: Claire Colebrook
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University

• Colebrook, Claire. “Slavery and the Trumpocene: It’s Not the End of the World.” Oxford Literary Review 41(1): 40-50. July 2019.
• Colebrook, Claire. “Unthinkable Extinction: Cinematic Time and the Panorama of History." June 19, 2019. ALIENOCENE Journal of the First Outernational. n. pag. Web. https://alienocene.com/category/theory-fiction-2/

• “Submerged Perspectives,” in Gomez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies Decolonial Perspectives. London: Duke University Press, pp. 1-16.
• Mattern, Shannon. 2017. "The Big Data of Ice, Rocks, Soils, and Sediments."  Places Journal November. doi: https://doi.org/10.22269/171107.

Recommended:

• “Introduction,” in Kahn, Douglas. 2013. Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts. Oakland: University of California Press, pp.1-24.
• “Geology, Race, and Matter”, in Yusoff, Kathryn. 2019. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Forerunners: Ideas First. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1-22.

Earth Evidence

Speaker: Susan Schuppli
Director and Reader in the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmith’s, University of London

• Candice Hopkins. “Outlawed Social Life.” 2016. Documenta 14. n. pag. Web. https://www.documenta14.de/en/south/685_outlawed_social_life
• Candice Hopkins. 2011. “The Golden Potlatch: Study in Mimesis and Capitalist Desire.” Fillip 13. Spring 2011. n. pag. Web. https://fillip.ca/content/the-golden-potlatch-study-in-mimesis-and-capitalist-desire
• Candice Hopkins. “We Are Always Turning Around on Purpose: Reflecting on Three Decades of Indigenous Curatorial Practice.” Art Journal, Summer 2017. Vol. 76 Issue 2, 39-47

Indigenous Methodologies and Exhibition Making

Speaker: Candice Hopkins
Curator and writer

Student presentations of final projects.

What would you do (and who would you kill) in order to save the world?

Speaker: Claire Colebrook
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University