The Environmental Studies Workshop meets every other Friday at 12:00pm CT. Please see below for scheduled presentations.

Spring 2022 Schedule

April 1 – Calynn Dowler, Boston University

The Disastrous and the Divine: Water, Religion, and Climate Change in the Sundarbans Deltas.

How do people imagine and pursue a good life in uncertain socio-ecological environments? What role does religion play in this process? This paper considers these questions with attention to water-related uncertainties in the Sundarbans delta of West Bengal, India. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I employ a moral ecology framework to consider the divergent ways that people understand and respond to water-related disasters such as cyclones and floods. I argue that people shape themselves as moral persons through their relationships with the delta’s disastrous and divine ecologies. The paper focuses on a climate change awareness drama that enacted a modernizing Hindu ethics of social and environmental improvement. In the drama, climate change emerged as a moral concern, serving as a site for the articulation of new ideas about human agency and relationships with the nonhuman world. Ultimately, I suggest that the modernizing visions of human agency and improvement presented in the drama did not resonate for local audiences of small-scale farmers and fishers, in part because of their situated knowledges of the volatile waterscape. The paper concludes with a consideration of how Sundarbans islanders enact an alternative ethics of enduring difficulty when confronted with climate-related uncertainties.

April 15 – John Hayashi, Harvard University

History’s Rhythm: Climate, Calamity, and the Science of Cycles in Twentieth-Century Japan

This article explores the trajectory of a peculiar idea—the 700-year cycle theory—to illuminate connections between climate science and the shifting geographic imaginary in twentieth-century Japan. In the decades leading up to World War II, geophysicist Shida Toshi developed a theory of cyclical environmental and political change that characterized the past, present, and future of the expanding Japanese Empire. Shida’s research began with tree ring analysis of a trunk cutting from colonial Taiwan and came to incorporate textual and scientific evidence of disasters from across East Asia. After World War II, geographer Nishioka Hideo recast the theory within a national narrative and body of evidence that fit within postwar Japan’s decolonized borders. Nishioka shifted the emphasis of cyclical action from earthquakes and floods to atmospheric temperature, and over several decades he promoted the theory as proof of long-term, natural global warming. By adopting a perspective that reaches across the twentieth century, this article shows how the transition from empire to nation-state forced climate scientists to reformulate theories that reached for global coverage but were always already local. In doing so, it demonstrates the importance of locating heterodox, non-Western science within the global history of climate thought.

April 22 – Hannah Burnett, University of Chicago (cancelled)

Biomineralization: Making an Oyster Reef

This paper develops a social theory of biomineralization, the technical term for the process by which an oyster accrues its shell. Here, biomineralization also describes a racializing process of environmental management that links ecology and geology, binding life to place in the interest of profit. Drawing on interviews and maps of oyster leases and oil leases, this chapter analyzes the long decline of both public and private oyster reefs in Louisiana alongside racially exclusionary fishing regulations and oil and gas development. I argue that the decline of the reef and the imposition of exclusionary regulations are the effects of simultaneous investment in extraction and systemic disinvestment in communities of color, and I describe strategies of local anti-racist organizing in response to these patterns. I show how legacies of toxicity and violence manifest in the particular landscape form of oyster reefs, accumulating and enduring in the bodies of oysters and people.

May 6 – Toby Wu (cancelled)

Aesthetic Tensions in Water Mediations of the Cold War—Seascapes, Performance & Gameplay in Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s Memorial Project Series (2001-2014)

Jun Nguyen-Hatushiba’s Memorial Project series (2001-2014) investigates the difficulty of
visualising the tensions of the Cold War, utilising the critical interface of the sea body to activate contested histories. Filming within the metrics of performance enacted underwater, Nguyen-Hatsushiba is indisputably the first of many Asian visual artists to consider the mediation of history through the seascape, debuting this form at the inaugural Yokohama Triennial (2001). This paper will primarily consider Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s Project Nha Trang, Vietnam: Towards the Complex-For the Courageous, the Curious and the Cowards (2001) as exemplary of this mediation, engaging with Melody Jue’s conception of Wild Blue Media to consider the displacement of our normative environment of interpretation for Cold War narratives. Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s orchestration of performance within the seascape allows for encounters between contested notions of modernity, displacement and war-time conflict that cannot occur above-water, or on the ground. Yet, the performance of such mediation underwater also immediately connotes the seeming ephemerality of such occurrences and the retention of these histories, with few traces permanently embedded in the seabed.

As a counterpoint to the seascape mediated works of the series, the paper will also consider
Memorial Project Waterfield (2006-14). Nguyen-Hatsushiba staged Memorial Project Waterfield at the 2006 Gwangju Biennale as a performance work occurring over 20 days, with volunteers from Vietnam gradually forming a hybridised US & Vietnam flag through bottles of their urine. Nugyen-Hatsushiba later used video footage of the performance to produce and edit a single-channel work with an American first player shooter interface and Japanese anime sequences. Thus, critical consideration of these cultural-coded aesthetics and the work’s recombinatory effects allows us to problematise and engage with the tiers of displacement faced by the Vietnamese as a result of the Cold War. Furthermore, understanding Nguyen Hatsushiba’s positionality, as a diasporic artist of Vietnamese and Japanese descent living and working in the United States, will be a crucial mode of understanding the development of this form of water mediation, specifically through context of experimentation and art production for international biennales.

May 13 – *BOOK LAUNCH* Victor Seow, Harvard University

Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia

A forceful reckoning with the relationship between energy and power through the history of what was once East Asia’s largest coal mine.

The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit. First excavated in the early twentieth century, this pit grew like a widening maw over the ensuing decades, as various Chinese and Japanese states endeavored to unearth Fushun’s purportedly “inexhaustible” carbon resources. Today, the depleted mine that remains is a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality.

In Carbon Technocracy, Victor Seow uses the remarkable story of the Fushun colliery to chart how the fossil fuel economy emerged in tandem with the rise of the modern technocratic state. Taking coal as an essential feedstock of national wealth and power, Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists deployed new technologies like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage in pursuit of intensive energy extraction. But as much as these mine operators idealized the might of fossil fuel–driven machines, their extractive efforts nevertheless relied heavily on the human labor that those devices were expected to displace. Under the carbon energy regime, countless workers here and elsewhere would be subjected to invasive techniques of labor control, ever-escalating output targets, and the dangers of an increasingly exploited earth.

Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that led to its ascent endures. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. This is a groundbreaking exploration of how the mutual production of energy and power came to define industrial modernity and the wider world that carbon made.

May 20 – Eraldo Souza dos Santos, Panthéon-Sorbonne University (cancelled)

Airports, Peasants, and the Ethics of Flying

In the past two decades, movements against airport construction and expansion have become a global phenomenon. There are currently around 380 airport-related conflicts around the world. And local anti-airport activists have increasingly forged international solidarities with other similar movements. During the same period, public debate around airport construction and expansion has mainly turned around climate change. Most climate activists and policymakers today insist in this regard that increased plane travel, when supported by building new or larger airports, increases greenhouse gas emissions. And climate change is, so the argument runs, a problem everywhere and for everyone. In this paper, I will focus, however, on the social and environmental impact of airport development projects at the local level, especially on the lives of peasants. Historically, peasants have been the avant-garde of the anti-airport movement. And research shows that airport projects tend to lead to land displacement, water pollution, and soil erosion, impacting thereby local rural communities in a disproportionate way. I argue that it is necessary, therefore, to “glocalize” our ethical concerns around airport construction and expansion, by paying attention not only to the impact of aircraft emissions on climate change but also to how airport projects and plane travel negatively impact local communities and ecosystems around the world. This has been the effort in the past decade of networks of activists such as Stay Grounded and the Global Anti-Aerotropolis Movement.

May 27 – Thomaz Amancio, University of Chicago

Songs of the Field: Rural Labor and Landscape in a Folklore Collection

My dissertation explores the ways in which the written archive of Brazilian culture has sought to assimilate rural workers’ experience and knowledge of land, nature, and landscape – as well as their style and poetics – through folklore collections, social science, fiction, and poetry. In this chapter, I go back to the 19th century to explore how this dynamic played out in the post-Romantic moment when direct observation and documental value acquired a privileged status. In his Cantos Populares do Brazil (1883), the polymath Silvio Romero compiled a rich trove of songs performed by rural dwellers throughout Brazil. The cantos collected by Romero allowed a glimpse of the lifeworld of rural workers – as in the study of the scholar there opened a vista into the life and toil of Brazilian buckaroos – but did so only to the extent that they were mediated by the apparatuses of identification, collection, transcription, and classification that transformed them from “oral tradition” to “written archive”. Romero defined the rural worker as privileged informant, and labor itself as privileged scene of observation. Thus, the scientific drive and pastoral longing of the urbanized scholar was informed by the structured intimacy of the landowner turned ethnographer, generating an uneasy dynamic that would be often replayed in Brazilian cultural history, defining the conception (formerly) agrarian national elites had about their own conditions of existence.

Winter 2022 Schedule

January 21 – Alex Jania, Department of History, University of Chicago

Between the Emergency and the Everyday: The Lifecyles of the 1933 Showa-Sanriku Tsunami Memorial Halls in Miyagi Prefecture

On March 3, 1933, a magnitude 8.4 earthquake occurred off Japan’s Sanriku coast, triggering subsequent tsunami waves that inundated shoreline communities. The Shōwa-Sanriku Earthquake destroyed over 6,000 homes and killed over 3,000 people. As part of the reconstruction effort, the Miyagi Prefectural government constructed Tsunami Memorial Halls (Shinshōsai kinenkan or Kaishō kinenkan) in affected coastal towns. These memorial halls commemorated disaster victims and were also designed to be social settlement houses, serving as disaster education spaces, future evacuation sites, and community meeting halls.

This chapter tells the history of Miyagi Prefecture’s 1933 Tsunami Memorial Halls and uses it as a case study to grapple with the incommensurability of the human timescales of collective memory and the geologic timescales of seismic activity that periodically sets off disaster on Tōhoku’s pacific coast. I use the tension between these irreconcilable timescales as a productive space of inquiry to interrogate the “middle temporality” of disaster on the Sanriku Coast. Centering the memorial halls themselves, I examine their “memorial life cycles” from creation to second lives as repurposed public buildings, and eventually to varied deaths as they were demolished or forgotten. Ultimately, I argue that the history of the 1933 Tsunami Memorial Halls is a cautionary tale for post-disaster memorials that emphasizes the necessity to reckon with issues of scale when designing future post-disaster memorials in Japan and beyond.

February 4 – Eduardo Acosta, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

A River of Ruined Capitals: Nature, History, and Temporalities in Early Colonial Bengal

This chapter investigates narratives and debates around the changing course of the Bhagirathi-Hoohgly river in 18th and 19th century Bengal. By reading together maps, articles, hydrogeological surveys, travel diaries and poems, in English and Bengali, I show how a fact of everyday life in Bengal–that rivers change their course– inflected the understanding of Bengal’s history and its periodization, in particular the conceptualization of the idea of the medieval. I argue that the colonial interest in studying this meandering river and its history did not stem from administrative and revenue imperatives only. Rather, the history of the river became another site in which the engagement with Bengal’s past was coded in a teleological narrative that was deemed ‘natural.’ For these colonial narratives, the changing river, which had periodically taken away human structures, had also flattened the history of the region into a developmental history where the medieval ought to give way to the modern. The chapter seeks to contribute to ongoing debates about processes of periodization in the non-European world by querying these colonial natural histories of the Bhagirathi river.

February 18 – Sam Lee, The John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago

The Animal as Other in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and J. M. Coetzee 

I begin by arguing against Heidegger’s view of the animal in his 1929 lecture course, “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.” His famous claim that the animal is “world-poor” does not hold given his previous commitment to the essence of Dasein as Mitsein, a Being-with. Any engagement with the Other must include animals as those with whom Dasein shares its world. An authentic Mitsein with animals requires us to abandon our conventional views on the body, which from Descartes onwards has been considered a shell or vessel encasing the mind. Instead, Merleau-Ponty, in his 1949 lecture course “Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language,” offers a way out with his phenomenology of expression, in which interiority is accessible through gestures and facial movements—or to be more precise, interiority is fiction, the mind is the body. If this is the case, then the full Being of animals is likewise accessible through their bodies. The paper concludes with an analysis of the possibilities offered by the phenomenological approach as well as its limitations in Coetzee’s novel, Elizabeth Costello. In particular, Costello’s wholesale rejection of the methodological assumptions in Wolfgang Koehler’s 1917 Mentality of Apes stands in contrast with Merleau-Ponty’s approval of the anthropomorphism of Koehler’s description of his experiments.

March 4 – Cameron Hu, Postdoctoral Fellow, Konrad Lorenz Institute

Molecules of Freedom

“Molecules of Freedom” contemplates a methane flux now flowing skyward from the Permian Basin oilfield in West Texas. I consider how it may be seen to flow not least from a style of planetary-scale political reason one may call “cybernetic consequentialism,” wherein the Earth System weltbild dignifies destructive industrial avant-gardes—in this essay, fracking—as necessary evils whose obvious imperial violence it justifies in view of the greater, system-disfiguring evils they are expected to avert (but more often intensify).

Fall 2021 Schedule

October 8 – Ellen Askey, STAGE lab, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, University of Chicago

The River Project: Downstream

Inspired by PME Professor Supratik Guha’s Water-to-Cloud (W2C) project using sensor technology to monitor pollution in India’s rivers in real-time, and Ambedkar University Delhi’s Centre for Community Knowledge investigation the pollution’s socio-economic impact by interviewing riverine communities, STAGE’s The River Project is utilizing both data sets (the scientific research and the interviews) to develop a theatrical story on what the research can illuminate about water and humanity. In collaboration with environmental scientists, engineers, anthropologists, and artists, STAGE has built an international, interdisciplinary team to create the play. As part of STAGE’s process, and to ensure The River Project does not suggest to American audiences that this issue only affects India or to Indian audiences that this issue does not affect the US, STAGE collaborator Ellen Askey has created the short documentary film currently titled “Downstream” (22:36) on the impact of Midwestern farming practices on the water ecosystem in the US.

STAGE (Scientists, Technologists and Artists Generating Exploration) is an interdisciplinary lab embedded in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and dedicated to creating new film and theatre work about science and technology with students, faculty, and professional collaborators. The River Project team includes: Sanskriti Chitransh (Physics PhD candidate), Natalia Khosla (MD candidate), Ellen Askey (BA Cinema and Media Studies), and Caroline Sullivan (MAPH Comparative Literature).

October 29 –Sachaet Pandey, Department of History, University of Chicago

Hydro-Electric City: Textile Mills and the Adoption of Hydro-Electricity in Colonial Bombay

In 1915, a hydroelectric power plant was set up by the Tata corporation to provide electricity for some of the textile mills of Bombay. By 1928, Bombay, the Second City of Empire, had become, by some accounts, the most completely electrified city in the world: all of the city’s railway and tramway lines, its utilities company, and nearly all of its textile mills were using electricity generated by three such hydropower plants run by the Tatas. Moreover, none of this electricity was produced by burning fossil fuels. How did a region of the world that is often marked for its “lateness” in developmental terms come to adopt a form of energy that even today is represented as “new”? While retaining the insights of existing scholarship that has foregrounded the importance of indigenous capital and the support of the colonial state, this paper will bring the non-human into history by studying the geological and technological conditions of possibility for a hydroelectric Bombay. Then, by studying the relationships between the city’s textile mills and the Tata corporation that supplied them with hydro-electricity, this paper will examine how a coal-based energy regime was displaced by a hydro-electric one and will highlight the instability of this “energy transition” by studying the challenges it faced in order to question the air of finality that the idea of an energy transition might suggest.

November 5 – *BOOK LAUNCH* Sarah Fredericks, Associate Professor of Environmental Ethics, University of Chicago Divinity School

Environmental Guilt and Shame: Signals of Individual and Collective Responsibility and the Need for Ritual Responses

Bloggers confessing that they waste food, non-governmental organizations naming corporations selling unsustainably harvested seafood, and veterans apologizing to Native Americans at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation for environmental and social devastation caused by the United States government all signal the existence of action-oriented guilt and identity-oriented shame about participation in environmental degradation. Environmental Guilt and Shame demonstrates that these moral emotions are common among environmentally friendly segments of the United States but have received little attention from environmental ethicists though they can catalyze or hinder environmental action. Concern about environmental guilt and shame among “everyday environmentalists” reveals the practical, emotional, ethical, and existential issues raised by environmental guilt and shame and ethical insights about guilt, shame, responsibility, agency, and identity. A typology of guilt and shame enables the development and evaluation of these ethical insights.

Environmental Guilt and Shame makes three major claims: first, individuals and collectives, including the diffuse collectives that cause climate change, can have identity, agency, and responsibility and thus guilt and shame. Second, some agents, including collectives, should feel guilt and/or shame for environmental degradation if they hold environmental values and think that their actions shape and reveal their identity. Third, a number of conditions are required to conceptually, existentially, and practically deal with guilt and shame’s effects on agents. These conditions can be developed and maintained through rituals. Existing rituals need more development to fully deal with individual and collective guilt and shame as well as the anthropogenic environmental degradation that may spark them.

November 19 – *PANEL* Organized by Desiree Foerster, post-doctoral instructor, Cinema and Media Studies, UChicago

Carbon Aesthetics

An online panel that reflects carbon and the carbon cycle from an aesthetic perspective. Artists will present and discuss their work as it offers a sensual engagement with this most ubiquitous element. We argue that we need to develop an increased sensitivity to processes at the basis of the material world and our experience of them, in order to deal with environmental crises that cannot be reduced to the bifurcation of nature. The artists turn to the material as well as to the symbolisms and common representations of the interrelations between bio-chemical and technological processes inherent to the carbon cycle. Andrés Burbano (artist; Professor in the Department of Design at Universidad de los Andes) works with digital media to topologically explore global data about carbon in the atmosphere (taken from the Nasa database) in comparison with local data, thinking of place (Bogota in this case) as a planetary sensor. Myriel Milicevic’s (artist/designer; Professor for Elementary Design at the FH Potsdam) project takes a historically informed look at whales and the role they play as carbon tanks in current debates about carbon capture. Karolina Sobecka’s (Critical Media Lab Basel and the Institute for Aesthetic Practice and Theory HGK FHNW) current projects explores notions of ecology and governance through research in the fields of climate- and carbon- engineering.

December 3 – Carmine Morrow, Comparative Literature Department, University of Chicago

A Collaborative Alterity: How Ursula Le Guin Translates Nonhumanity in Always Coming Home

Ursula LeGuin’s Always Coming Home has been noted for its ecological consciousness (e.g. by Gary Snyder and Donna Haraway) but few have delved into its formal techniques. Translation, as a literary technique and critical frame, is integral to LeGuin’s masterful integration of mediums, disciplines, and cultures. I would like to describe how translation functions in Always, as it often does in exploratory writing, to intervene into the way we (as Anglophone readers) read and collaborate with alterity (other languages, cultures, species) in the context of ecological crisis.

Always focuses on people who “might be going to have lived” in a post-crisis California. Le Guin’s fictional Na River and its adjacent post-crisis “Inland Sea” are geographically the Napa River Valley, CA, where she spent her summers as a child, but, culturally, it represents the Indigenous people who live along the Klamath River, CA (a system a bit further to the north). Linguistically, however, it is, thanks to Le Guin, a landscape inscribed with classical Chinese philosophy. Le Guin was an avid reader and translator of the Zhuangzi (莊子) and the Dao de Jing (道德經). LeGuin thus wrote much of the material in Always as if it were translated from a foreign language. Always hence became a collaboration with artists of different mediums (cartographers, musicians, sketch artists), but also an extension of Le Guin’s translation of classical Chinese texts, and, moreover, it became an iteration of her parents’ (Alfred and Theodora Kroeber) anthropological work on the Klamath River’s Indigenous culture. In this way, translation in Always puts in relief exploratory poetics’ role as a theory of literary technique attentive to ethical, political—and personal—aspects of our attempts at worldmaking and worldbreaking.

New modes of thinking demand new modes of signification to think and communicate with. As the ecological humanities continues to engage with cultures and languages other to Anglophone worlds, and to filch concepts from classical texts (e.g. oikos), we will keep returning to LeGuin’s formulation of translation as collaborative practice and critical frame in Always Coming Home.

Winter 2021 Schedule

TBA

Spring 2021 Schedule

TBA