Unraveling the Anthropocene: Race, Environment, and Pandemic
By Liberal Arts Collective
Unraveling the Anthropocene: Race, Environment, and PandemicApr 15, 2022
SPECIAL EPISODE! (Co)Figurations of Care: Experience and Infrastructure in the Medical Humanities
SPECIAL EPISODE! (Co)Figurations of Future: Ecocritical Approaches to Virtual Worlds
The Anthropocene: From Classical Philosophy to Climate Ethics Today
In this episode, LAC member Merve Tabur interviews Penn State professor Mark Sentesy. Sentesy introduces his research in philosophical anthropology and the Anthropocene and discusses how ancient views on human relationship to nature compare to our modern-day conceptions. Underscoring the significance of a philosophical understanding of environmental justice concerns today, Sentesy also shares his pedagogical approaches to teaching climate ethics.
Beyond Dichotomies: Shaman Stories in Contemporary Literature
In this episode, LAC member Müge Gedik interviews Dr. Özlem Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu. Dr. Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu discusses her new book project Shamanism in the Contemporary Novel: Histories of Lands, Animals, and Peoples beyond the Nature/Culture Divide on shamanism in contemporary literature, encompassing Northern Siberia, China, North America, Australia, and Turkey. She highlights the importance of kinship and forging ties with other human and more-than-human life forms as resistance to overextraction and global capitalist discourses. Lastly, we explore the current trends, studies, and communities in literature and environment and environmental humanities in Turkey.
Multispecies Entanglement and Contagion in Ottoman Travel Writings and Miniatures
Artist Residencies for International Social Change
Unraveling the Anthropocene Roundtable - Dr. Ranco, Anderson-Barbata, and Leyam-Fernández
This episode is a recording of the Unraveling the Anthropocene roundtable, our keynote event which was held on March 29 of 2021, in the context of the Comparative literature luncheon speaker series.
Merve Tabur (LAC vice president) introduced the speakers and served as moderator.
The event gathered over 50 attendees from various departments, who participated in an enriching Q&A session. The Q&A session was not recorded.
During the event, speakers shared audiovisual materials with the audience. Visit our website to see some of those materials.
Intergenerational Memory: Revival of Trauma, Dersim Massacre, COVID-19 Pandemic
In this episode, LAC member Müge Gedik interviews Berfin Çiçek, a graduate student in Cultural Studies at Sabancı University in Turkey. They discuss Berfin’s project on the revival of trauma and intergenerational memory catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Berfin takes the testimony of a member from the descendent generation of Dersim massacre victims from Turkey, his grandfather, into the focus of her project while exploring how traumatic experiences trigger each other and create an intergenerational memory in general, and more specifically, during the COVID-19 quarantine. Berfin considers testimonials crucial evidence and attributes to established theories, mostly by Cathy Caruth and Dori Laub.
Grassroots Education for Social Change in Brazil and Beyond
Cosmic Consciousness: Exploring Racial, Viral, Environmental Pandemics through Spirituality
In this episode, LAC member Müge Gedik has a conversation with Dr. Michele Prettyman on the intersection between academic and spiritual discourses. The episode explores certain political implications of excluding certain views of life and inhabiting the world. Dr. Prettyman advocates for spiritually animating inquiry as a part of our lives. This part of inquiry opens a space for discovery and imagination to engage with life’s bigger questions as a response to very few people outside of certain fields being invited to those conversations. The ways in which we process knowledge by excluding spirituality reveal the limitation of racism and white patriarchy. Dr. Prettyman offers her way of challenging and undoing those models with spiritual discourse. She interrogates how the category of “the human” is fraud and an incomplete category. Focusing on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, she positions spirituality as another dimension of human experience in navigating life amidst racial, social, and environmental pandemics to rethink systems and structures that center life beyond violence and exploitation.
Police Power and Pandemic Pressures
How does antiblackness, slavery, and police power structure society? What has the COVID-19 pandemic revealed about policing? In this episode LAC member Irenae Aigbedion has a provocative conversation with Dr. Tryon Woods (University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth; Providence College) on police violence, police power, and the interrelated systems and inequities that structure society. The two discuss the ways that state and police power has transformed from slavery to the present. Ultimately, they touch on the struggle to consume and process the vast amounts of information presented to us daily via multiple competing channels.
Toward a Just Transition: Environmental Justice and Community Organizing in Central Appalachia
In this episode, LAC member Merve Tabur interviews community organizers Colleen Unroe, Teri Blanton, and Parson Brown. Unroe, Blanton, and Brown share their experiences with various nonviolent direct actions to stop mountaintop removal coal mining. They discuss the significance of documenting the stories of people who are most affected by the abuses of the coal industry. They also reflect on the evolution of community organizing strategies over the years and emphasize the importance of "Just Transition" efforts seeking to build alternative economic development and renewable energy within Central Appalachia.
Anthropocene as Kleptocene: Colonial Theft, Ecological Destruction, Indigenous Activism
In this episode, LAC member Müge Gedik has a conversation with Kyle Keeler on the colonial roots of our current epoch, popularly referred to as “the Anthropocene.” Keeler highlights the history of centuries of violent colonialism that would set in motion the industrial production, chemicals, and bomb blasts that are argued to distinguish the Anthropocene from previous epochs. Focusing on violent colonial theft, Keeler changes the name of this epoch to the Kleptocene, to call attention to to the theft of land, lives (both human and nonhuman), and materials that colonialism broadly, but U.S. settler colonialism specifically, imposed and imposes on North America and its Indigenous inhabitants, as a way to understand global environmental catastrophes. This episode foregrounds indigenous resistance that has been ongoing in this process of theft and extraction. Keeler situates his research on the Kleptocene as a way to imagine, decolonize, and create a future free of colonial theft and ecological destruction on repatriated land.
Venetian Ecologies: Acqua Alta, Climate Change, and Pollution
In this episode, LAC member Merve Tabur has a conversation with Dr. Daniel Finch-Race on the impact of climate change on Venice and the mitigation efforts led by the government, the NGOs, and the local community. Describing life in Venice during the November 2019 flood, Dr. Finch-Race discusses the various coping strategies adopted by the city's inhabitants and comments on how the pandemic has affected pollution levels in Venice. Dr. Finch-Race also examines the similarities and differences between our contemporary affective responses to environmental destruction and representations of environmental issues in late eighteenth-century French and Italian art and literature.
Personal Impressions (Ep. 1): A drag queen living the pandemic
Pablo Valenzuela, Chilean teacher and drag queen, shares his experience and that of his community living during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Encounters with Viral Objects: Tracing the Genealogies of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Multispecies Entanglements in the Anthropocene: Ecocide, Speciesism, Vulnerability
In a conversation with LAC member Müge Gedik, Rimona Afana discusses the ties between speciesism and ecocide. She argues that without challenging our speciesist beliefs and institutions, we cannot advance justice and peace in the Anthropocene. Rimona’s cross-disciplinary research informs her multimedia artwork, collaborative projects, and activism. We will also listen to a short excerpt of her audio/video poem, “wood”, and learn about the story behind it.
Altermundos in the comics of Chile, Argentina, and Brazil
In a conversation with LAC member Camila Gutiérrez (Penn State), Javiera Irribarren (Columbia University) discusses how contemporary graphic narratives from Chile, Argentina and Brazil offer non-western views on the interactions between species, time, and spaces. She argues that South American artists make a decolonial move in these comics; questioning historical and contemporary conflicts. In these materials, Irribarren finds powerful alter-native critiques of the current neoliberal State, which she describes as driven by politics of consumption in the age of the Anthropocene or Capitalocene. Irribarren also talks about her experience using these materials in the Spanish-language classroom at Columbia.
"Shelter-in-Art": A Creative Memorialization of the Pandemic
Feminist Art Education & Mental Health during COVID
LAC member Camila Gutiérrez interviews working artist, teacher, and researcher Melissa Leaym-Fernandez. Leaym-Fernandez has worked in a variety of creative learning spaces that include rural towns, urban cities, and sites with environmental toxins, including with the lead-poisoned in Flint, Michigan, and many other students who are intimidated to develop creative skills but need them in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her professional practice includes using artmaking to teach people how to express their personal voice, share feelings, and support their community through artistic skills in a non-threatening but challenging manner.
Recognizing Indigenous Law as Law: The Reverse Side of Coloniality in the Anthropocene
In this episode, LAC member Müge Gedik welcomes Dr. Paulo Ilich Bacca, a legal ethnographer and the Director of Ethnic and Racial Discrimination Area at Dejusticia, Centre for the Study of Law, Justice, and Society in Bogotá, Colombia. Paulo’s research proposes the idea of indigenizing international law by following the anthropological turn in which indigenous cosmologies are direct to the framework of an international legal order. This displacement highlights the power of indigenous law to counteract international law’s colonial legacies. This episode covers the problem with conceptualizing legal subjects through the exclusion of indigenous people from legal orders. Paulo’s objective is to look at Western and indigenous jurisprudence by scrutinizing colonial enterprise and indigenous resistance and bridging the gap between indigenous and state-centric law.
“All the Way to Hell”: Mineral Rights Between Art and Activism
In Episode 14, “‘All the Way to Hell’: Mineral Rights Between Art and Activism,” Hannah Matangos and Merve Tabur interview visual artist and activist Eliza Evans. Evans introduces her activist-art project “All the Way to Hell,” which aims to draw attention to fossil fuel development on private land in the U.S. by giving away mineral rights to participants. In addition to discussing the purpose and reception of the project, Evans, Hannah, and Merve also have a conversation about the history and legal aspects of mineral rights in Oklahoma.
Linking Climate Justice and Racial Justice through Eco-intersectional Analyses
What is the connection between race and environmental justice? Which communities are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis? How does including race along with class, gender, sexuality, and disability for climate justice provide a broader perspective on climate change research and adaptation strategies? In this episode, LAC member Müge Gedik interviews Dr. Nancy Tuana (Penn State, UP) about her new project “Climate Apartheid: Forgetting of Race in the Anthropocene.” We focus on an eco-intersectional analysis that is necessary to understand intersecting and co-constituting axes of systemic oppression of certain groups of people and environmental exploitation and degradation. Topics include the intersections of the COVID-19 pandemic and the disproportionate effects of ecological destruction and climate change on black, native American, and indigenous communities in the United States and Brazil. Dr. Tuana highlights the importance of integrating ethical issues into modeling in climate change research to have ethically and epistemically responsible adaptation practices geared towards what communities value and to make the decisions that matter to them.
Endless Creativity: Examining Intersections of Performance, Protest, and Pandemic in Latin America
What does performance and protest look like in a time of pandemic? How do we study live performance at a moment when keeping our distance is the safest way to keep safe? When do we as researchers stop observing and put our bodies on the line in solidarity with protest movements? In this episode, Irenae Aigbedion (LAC) and Camila Gutiérrez (LAC) interview Dr. Elizabeth Gray (Penn State) on her current and future work on art and activism in Latin America. We focus on her book project, The Poetics of Intervention: Art and Activism in Contemporary Latin America, visiting Chile, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina through Dr. Gray’s stories and reflections on the transformative art and publishing practices that have emerged in these countries. Our conversation shifts to an exploration of the beginnings of her second project, an analysis of Mapuche activism and the battle for land rights in Chile. Together, we open up a larger discussion of social movements—in particular student led movements—that have fundamentally reshaped the country.
Self Made Masks: Negotiating Identities in Medicine and Art
Pandemics as a Politics of Death in the Anthropocene: Is a Virus a Dispositif?
Transboundary Water Justice and Environmental Peacebuilding in the Middle East
Candomblé in Crisis: Confronting Religious and Environmental Racism in Brazil
Navigating Risk, Race, and Gender in American Adrenaline Narratives
From Confederate Monuments to COVID-19: Data Glitches and the Aesthetics of Decay
Critiquing Whiteness through Constructive Discomfort: The Art Practice of Jeff Musser
You can view the artworks, artists, and exhibitions discussed in the episode by heading to our website: sites.psu.edu/liberalartscollective
History's Rough Draft: Documenting #BlackLivesMatter in New York City
Symbiosis: Eating and Thinking with Multiplicity in the Anthropocene
In this episode, LAC member Müge Gedik welcomes Dr. Margot Finn (University of Michigan) to talk about her project “Bellies Full of Stars: Feeding Multitudes of Multitudes in Apocalyptic Times.” This conversation begins with Margot Finn’s approach to the Anthropocene and her conceptualization of apocalypse. She underlines the importance of the ways we tell stories about time, the future, what it means to coexist. Coexistence and symbiosis become crucial tools for the discussion of multispecies justice in food futures in the Anthropocene, elaborated through examples of eating and thinking with companion species such as the lichen, the Hawaiian Bobtail Squid, and the Matsutake mushroom. Margot Finn points at the difference between the metaphorical distinctions between symbiosis and parasitism and the biological reality where interrelations are not usually mutually beneficial. Finn highlights the ways the pandemic has forced her (and she hopes others) into a new awareness of the dual racist epidemics of violent policing and disproportionate COVID-19 deaths in Black & Indigenous & Latinx communities.
Irreverent Humor: Coping with COVID across Africa
In this episode, LAC members Irenae Aigbedion and Tembi Charles welcome Dr. Sinfree Makoni (Penn State) and Dr. Bassey Antia (University of the Western Cape) to have a conversation about their project, "Humor as a Semiotic Resource: Coping with COVID-19 Stress in Africa." The conversation branches out from a close examination of their work to a reflection on the ways that humor can be a tool to "speak back" to power, to critique histories of colonialism, and to shape a new identity for Africa itself. Humor becomes a critical tool we all need to navigate the unique social pressures we are currently facing.