CEGU

Environmentalism often functions as a form of public political theorizing, articulating conceptions of power, justice, and politics itself to render environmental problems thinkable. This chapter examines how the U.S. climate movement has historically problematized climate change as a political issue, tracing the evolution of this articulation through the work of two key figures: Al Gore and Bill McKibben. I argue that Gore’s early 1990s framing of climate change as a moral problem reflected a strategic, if ironically depoliticizing, figuration of “the political.” His vision transformed climate change from a scientific hypothesis into a political problem by subordinating politics to human morality, precluding critique of the power relations driving the crisis. Thirty years later, McKibben reconfigured climate change as an agonistic struggle against fossil fuel interests, revindicating politics as a site of contestation and collective agency. Yet, McKibben’s framing also exposes the conceptual exhaustion of inherited categories, blurring distinctions between industry and state and raising new questions about power in a planetary fossil regime. By situating these shifts within their historical “problem-spaces,” this chapter offers a genealogy of how climate change has been rendered political and reflects on the need for new political imaginaries adequate to the current conjuncture.

Co-sponsored by the East Asia: Transregional Histories Workshop

Workshop for CEGU 3rd years planning to complete a BA thesis.

Drop in office hours hosted by CEGU Research Mentor Nina Olney, for consultation on IRB applications for undergraduate research.

Abstract:

This paper will explore the iconography of treaties in contemporary art practices in the context of one hundred years of the Indian Citizenship Act to Land Back. The Act itself centers on the human and the closing of the co-constitutive power of the US and Canadian territorial sovereignty. The act domesticates Indians as citizens under the shroud of American Legal territorial sovereignty, moving Indigenous lands to the purview of the secretary of the Interior in the US and under the Indian Act in Canada. In contrast to this moment, artists have long depicted an alternative vision of the relationship between belonging and land that exceeds settler borders and their colonial premises that settlement is final.

I will look at examples of the reconfiguration of forms of territorial sovereignty through art practices that rethink land and relationships not only between landed points but also in relation to other humans and more-than-humans. How do contemporary art practices create not only a sense of belonging but also a sense of reciprocity and responsibility? How is a “sea to shining sea” affective regime of belonging disrupted by the visual impact of Indigenous artists? What might we gain from examining public art and other built environments where the subtlety of assertion of treaty rights, existing before the 1924 act, is not so apparent to an American public but is the iconography that creates a sense of belonging from those in reciprocal relationships with Indigenous Nations? How does expressive citizenship creatively refuse a hundred years of US and Canadian citizenship and thus disrupt colonial geographies based on property logics?

Sponsored by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization; Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity; Environmental Humanities+Arts Lab; Department of Art History

Archaeology of the Anthropocene: Culture and Political Ecologies of Stuff | Exhibition Opening

Featuring work from the students of CEGU 20003: Global Environmental Change

Material culture is the "stuff" of everyday life and shines a bright light on human experience within with wider processes of economic, environmental, and technological change. Common objects are an entrée to exploring human transformations of the planet and understanding our collective place within the long arc of history. The objects represented in the exhibit can be considered messages to the future that, if unearthed many years hence, will reveal how people in 2025 lived and what they valued.

Register here.

This transportation summit brings together faculty and students to create the future of mobility and safety on campus. In response to concerns spanning campus safety, sustainability, and accessibility, this event will serve as a platform to present innovative solutions that prioritize safe, equitable, and active transportation planning. Numerous faculty, RSO, and community members will present on current advocacy and planning projects to improve campus mobility. The event will also feature town hall-style conversations and mapping activities to collaboratively visualize solutions. 

The summit intends to bring together ideas from the campus and neighborhood community to improve mobility through better transportation accessibility, sustainability, and safety. Join us as we reimagine the design and safety of our campus to put pedestrians first, reduce emissions, and enhance student quality of life.

Click here to register for this event.

Sponsored by the University of Chicago Environmental Alliance, USG Committee on Campus Sustainability, the Urbanism Lab, and CEGU

In this talk, I will present my research on the placemaking practices of the Black house music and cultural community of Chicago and how they developed an alternative map of Chicagothrough house music, house culture, and what I termed, “house geographies.” Since the Great Migration, Black Chicagoans were confined to the South and West Sides due to the racialization of space and how it shaped the ways they live in and move through their city. Geographers, urban social theorists, and ethnomusicologists examine Black Chicago and its rich music and cultural histories and how it deepens our understanding of Black urban life. Less attention has been paid to the spatial dimensions of Black music, sound, and culture across Chicagoland. I highlight the relationships between place-based music, sound, and geography as a framework for Black “a-where-ness” in Chicago through a Black sense of place and how Black expressive forms counter discriminatory processes to produce spaces that do not harm Black life. I turn to Black acoustemologies—how Black people know, order, and understand their worlds through what is audible to and for them—to demonstrate how the Black house kids repurposed abandoned spaces as sites of resistance, but also for kinship, joy, and pleasure. By journeying through the chord progressions of Black life, I foreground the placemaking practices of the Black house kids who constructed Black spaces in a “house that is only as safe as the flesh [1]” in one of the most racially segregated cities in America.

[1] Katherine McKittrick. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press. 2006. #citeBlackwomen

april l. graham-jackson is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Sociology and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Mansueto Institute For Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago. She is also a Postdoctoral Research Affiliate with Chicago Studies, the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU), and the Urban Theory Lab. A proud third-generation Black Chicagolander, april’s research brings together Black geographies, the political economy of scale, racial capitalism, music, and sound and how these forces shape Blackness and Black life across the Chicago Metropolitan Area or what she termed Black Chicagoland. april holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Mount Holyoke College as the first person with a bachelor’s degree in Black Geographies. You can find april musing with Roderick, her husband and artistic partner, at BlackChicagoland.com.

Join us for an information session on the Environmental Law Undergraduate Clinical Practicum!

Through clinic participation, students learn substantive environmental law and procedures for addressing concerns through the courts, administrative agencies, and legislative bodies. Students develop core advocacy competencies, such as spotting issues, conducting factual investigations, performing practical legal research, advocating through written and oral communications, planning cases, managing time, and addressing ethical issues and dilemmas.

Join CEGU on April 4th to learn more about our undergraduate grant opportunities, as well as tips and tricks for writing a successful application.

Register here.

This paper is a draft of part of the fifth and final chapter of my dissertation, “When a World Moves On: Land, Life and Struggle in the Peruvian Andes.” In it, I ask us to reconsider the history of peasant agriculture over the twentieth century. Indeed, today peasant agriculture is typically viewed as a marginal activity, an anachronistic holdover from an agrarian past doomed to disappear. And yet by taking Peru as a case study, I demonstrate how amidst historic demographic growth, the countryside filled with a record number of peasants, farming at a level of intensity never seen before. In so doing, I challenge dominant conceptual frameworks for Peruvian and Latin American history by revealing a remarkable expansion of peasant agriculture as the most important driver of change across much of the countryside. In this chapter, I point to how the rapid proliferation of peasant agriculture came as part and parcel of an equally stunning period of expanding human activity and anthropogenic change as well as propose the need to broaden existing accounts of that phenomenon beyond a few regions (the Global North) or certain activities (fossil fuel use, industrialization, plantation agriculture). In brief, my research stresses the need for a much closer examination of peasant agriculture to better understand the world we have inherited.

 

To tell the story of the dramatic growth of peasant agriculture, my dissertation uses a hundred-year microhistory of a single valley called Antapampa. Beginning at the dawn of the twentieth century, chapter one paints a picture of a peasant agriculture still defined by a relatively low person-to-land ratio as well as an absence of fossil fuels, mechanized technology, or modified seeds, in a basically stable ecological setting. Over the next two chapters, covering the period 1900-1968, I show how historic population growth saw estate and communal land concentrations collapse, all amidst one of Latin America’s largest ever peasant movements. In chapter four, 1968-1980, I detail how with limited arable plots available for redistribution, the continent’s most radical agrarian reform failed to address mounting land pressure. In the final chapter, 1980-1995, I document how extreme land fragmentation, along with technical support from Green Revolution inspired NGOs and technologies, engendered a mass intensification of agricultural production and an unparalleled upheaval of the ecological status quo.

Access the full chapter here.

Join us to learn more about CEGU's new Capstone offering, CP2! The Community Project Capstone Program (CP2) track advances students’ direct participation in the work of Chicago area organizations whose missions align with themes of the CEGU major in the fields of conservation, urban affairs and environmental justice. Students will design, plan and develop projects and learn how to manage them through an iterative and reflexive process of collaborative learning-by-doing.

Project teams work independently with close faculty guidance and organization mentorship on projects of urgent concern to partner organizations in their program areas. Students in the CP2 track gain valuable research skills and build capacity to communicate ideas to diverse publics. CP2 can be completed in students’ third or fourth year. Participation in CP2 is by application only.

Thanks to a generous gift from the Redekop family, CEGU offers funding awards for Ph.D. research projects engaged with CEGU themes, including socio-environmental studies, urban environmental studies, energy histories and geographies, environmental humanities, and more. University of Chicago Ph.D. students across all disciplines can apply for funding up to $5,000 per person.

Grants can be used to cover field work related expenses including travel costs, access to archival or digital materials, interview compensations, and other research-related expenses. Preference will be given to students who are pursuing the CEGU Doctoral Certificate, and to those who have not previously received funding. Please bear in mind that our funding is limited and that applying to a CEGU grant does not preclude you from applying for funding from other sources at the University and beyond. Please register for the info session here. 

This talk offers a philosophical meditation on various social and ecological interventions made in the relatively new field of urban agroecology. Specifically, it shows how urban agroecologies are situated at the intersection of a complex set of debates in urban design/planning, the agricultural sciences, and social and political activism on how food production in urban centers has political stakes. While some of these stakes will need revising given the technological and social complexity of urbanization in the twenty-first century (it’s a planetary in scale), the talk ultimately attempts to reframe this debate in terms of important philosophical questions urban agroecology raises but is generally unequipped to answer (e.g., on the divisions between biology and technology, the urban and the rural, and even computable and incomputable problems). To make headway, the talk argues that what remains underdeveloped is how agroecological urbanism is a design problem that lacks a theoretical framework. And it’s by articulating the nature and scope of designing in this context, with help from Alfred North Whitehead on social ecologies, that the field can move beyond certain conceptual and practical impasses. The talk ultimately charts a path for philosophical design and urbanism to  intervene in the social ecologies of agricultural production across diverse urban landscapes.

From a marshy “wasteland” to a sprawling manufacturing complex to a scattered assemblage of industrial ruins, Chicago’s southeast side has experienced massive environmental transformations guided by more than one dream of landscape improvement. What can we learn from the processes of degradation and restoration that occurred in this wetland-turned-industrial zone? How might attunement to these cycles prepare us both for new rounds of modification and, more speculatively, for the impending, forced dereliction of coastal cities facing sea-level rise?

Please join CEGU and the Urban Theory Lab at a colloquium featuring Craig Colten, Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography Emeritus at Louisiana State University. Over a long and distinguished research career, Professor Colten has focused on perilous landscapes created by the combined forces of industrial contamination, ecological change and malign neglect both in Chicagoland and southern Louisiana. He is the author of seven books and dozens of articles that have shaped the field of environmental historical geography. Before taking up his position at LSU, Craig Colten spent a decade at the Illinois State Museum where he conducted the definitive research on industrial hazardous waste disposal in northern Illinois. 

About the book: The Petro-state Masquerade is a historical and ethnographic study of the fraught relationship between fossil fuels and political power in Trinidad and Tobago. Anthropologist Ryan Cecil Jobson traces how a model of governance fashioned during prior oil booms is imperiled by declining fossil fuel production and a loss of state control. After more than a century of commercial oil production, Trinidad and Tobago instructs us to regard the petro-state as less a permanent form than a fragile relation between fossil fuels and sovereign authority. Foregrounding the concurrent masquerades of oil workers, activists, and Carnival revelers, Jobson argues that the promise of decolonization lies in the disarticulation of natural resources, capital, and political power by ordinary people in the Caribbean.

About the author: Ryan Cecil Jobson is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. His research is preoccupied with questions of energy, sovereignty, race, and capitalism in the Caribbean and the Americas. His first book, The Petro-State Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago, was published by the University of Chicago Press in December 2024. His writing is featured in American Anthropologist, American  Ethnologist, Current Anthropology, The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, and Small Axe. He currently serves as coeditor-in-chief of Transforming Anthropology, the flagship journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists.

Learn more and register here.

An exhibition curated by the students of Professor Jessica Landau's CEGU/ARTH/CHST 20164: Exhibiting the Environmental Humanities

An alumna of the University of Chicago (1918), May Theilgaard Watts (1893-1975) was a groundbreaking naturalist, educator, artist, and activist of the 20^th century. After studying botany and ecology here, at UChicago, Watts had a multifaceted career that brought her from one room school houses to the Morton Arboretum, and in which she shared her knowledge through poetry, PBS TV programming, elementary science curriculums, art, nature writing, and more. Her legacy left important physical marks on the Chicagoland area - she gave us the Prairie Path, one of the nation’s first rails-to-trails pathways as well as several books (all still in print!) and countless lessons on plant identification and ecology. The importance of Watts’s legacy reaches beyond trails and lesson plans, however. We can all learn a lot from Watts’s educational philosophy, which sought to connect students of all ages, on a personal level, to their local landscapes and build community around a love of even the most unassuming habitats. This exhibition traces the many ways Watts instilled this love and built community in her overlapping roles as a naturalist, educator, artist, and activist. We hope it inspires you to get outside, to be curious and playful, and learn more about the landscapes around you.

Register here.

Join us on Friday, February 14th, for the 3rd year BA Thesis and Capstone Information session. During this session students will learn more about both of the available tracks, as well as further information on the BA Thesis/Capstone application process.

This session will be recorded and shared following the event. Attendance is required for all 3rd year CEGU majors.

Register here.

In Plastic: An Autobiography, Cobb’s obsession with a large plastic car part leads her to explore the violence of our consume-and-dispose culture, including her own life as a child of Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were made. The journey exposes the interconnections among plastic waste, climate change, nuclear technologies, and racism. Using a series of interwoven narratives ― from ancient Phoenicia to Alabama ― the book bears witness to our deepest entanglements and asks how humans continue on this planet.

Allison Cobb is the author of After We All Died (Ahsahta Press); Plastic: an autobiography (Essay Press EP series); Born2 (Chax Press); and Green-Wood, originally published by Factory School with a new edition in 2018 from Nightboat Books. Cobb works for the Environmental Defense Fund and lives in Portland, Oregon, where she co-hosts The Switch reading, art, and performance series and performs in the collaboration Suspended Moment.

Organized by the Environmental Humanities Lab, Department of English, Department of Creative Writing, and CEGU

In this talk, I will present my research on the placemaking practices of the Black house music and cultural community of Chicago and how they developed an alternative map of Chicagothrough house music, house culture, and what I termed, “house geographies.” Since the Great Migration, Black Chicagoans were confined to the South and West Sides due to the racialization of space and how it shaped the ways they live in and move through their city. Geographers, urban social theorists, and ethnomusicologists examine Black Chicago and its rich music and cultural histories and how it deepens our understanding of Black urban life. Less attention has been paid to the spatial dimensions of Black music, sound, and culture across Chicagoland. I highlight the relationships between place-based music, sound, and geography as a framework for Black “a-where-ness” in Chicago through a Black sense of place and how Black expressive forms counter discriminatory processes to produce spaces that do not harm Black life. I turn to Black acoustemologies—how Black people know, order, and understand their worlds through what is audible to and for them—to demonstrate how the Black house kids repurposed abandoned spaces as sites of resistance, but also for kinship, joy, and pleasure. By journeying through the chord progressions of Black life, I foreground the placemaking practices of the Black house kids who constructed Black spaces in a “house that is only as safe as the flesh [1]” in one of the most racially segregated cities in America.

[1] Katherine McKittrick. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press. 2006. #citeBlackwomen

april l. graham-jackson is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Sociology and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Mansueto Institute For Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago. She is also a Postdoctoral Research Affiliate with Chicago Studies, the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU), and the Urban Theory Lab. A proud third-generation Black Chicagolander, april’s research brings together Black geographies, the political economy of scale, racial capitalism, music, and sound and how these forces shape Blackness and Black life across the Chicago Metropolitan Area or what she termed Black Chicagoland. april holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Mount Holyoke College as the first person with a bachelor’s degree in Black Geographies. You can find april musing with Roderick, her husband and artistic partner, at BlackChicagoland.com.

At this event, organized by the Phytological Critique research project at the Neubauer Collegium, visiting writer Matt Bell will discuss his experiences as an author and critic in the emerging genre of climate fiction, drawing on examples from science fiction, fantasy, and other literary genres. As Amitav Ghosh wrote, “The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” – and so the climate crisis must also require imaginative approaches and solutions. What new art forms or story shapes or philosophies or other intellectual technologies might we invent to help us make a better future together?

A livestream of this event will be available via Zoom.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Matt Bell is the author, most recently, of the novel Appleseed (a New York Times notable book) and Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision. He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a nonfiction book about the classic video game Baldur's Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

Register here.

Join CEGU for a conversation with Eddie Ahn, author of Advocate: A Graphic Memoir of Family, Community, and the Fight for Environmental Justice.

About Advocate: Born in Texas to Korean immigrants, Eddie grew up working at his family’s store with the weighty expectations that their sacrifices would be paid off when he achieved the “American Dream.” Years later after moving to San Francisco and earning a coveted law degree, he then does the unthinkable: he rejects a lucrative legal career to enter the nonprofit world.

In carving his own path, Eddie defies his family’s notions of economic success, igniting a struggle between family expectations, professional goals, and dreams of community. As an environmental justice attorney, he confronts the most immediate issues the country is facing today, from the devastating effects of Californian wildfires to economic inequality, all while combatting burnout and racial prejudice. In coming fully into his own, Eddie also reaches a hand back to his parents, showing them the value of a life of service rather than one spent only seeking monetary wealth.

Weaving together humorous anecdotes with moments of victory and hope, this powerful, deeply contemplative full-color graphic novel explores the relationship between immigration and activism, opportunity and obligation, and familial duty and community service.

Register here.

During the New Deal, the federal government radically reimagined its relationship to energy through the pursuit of a National Power Policy, which included the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Rural Electrification Administration, and the amendment of the Federal Power Act. At a time when the energy sector was almost entirely privately-controlled, the Roosevelt administration envisioned a greatly expanded role for the federal government in the generation and transmission of electric power. Through an historical sociological study of the development of the New Deal power program, I will explore why increasing the supply and consumption of electricity nationwide became a state priority. I identify an emergent defense-industry-consumption “nexus”, which came to rely on an abundant supply of cheap electricity during the New Deal. Federal efforts to increase generating capacity and create a national “grid” helped funnel electricity toward capitalist industry, in no small part to prevent future war-time power shortages. New supplies of electricity that could not be used immediately by industry were directed toward household consumption, particularly in rural areas. I suggest that, during the New Deal, cheap electricity was firmly established as a general condition of production and reproduction, creating a new role for the American state: maintaining the electric systems and securing the fuel necessary for their continued operation. The paper concludes that theorizing the modern state’s relationship to energy, particularly attending to how state priorities are channeled into actual domestic energy systems, can help shed light on key state functions, with lasting political and environmental consequences.

Click here to access the full paper.

Colonial maps, geographer Matthew Edney asserts, constitute an unworkably backwards analytic object; cartographic practice was so central to the establishment, operation, and expansion of European empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that it would be more historically and conceptually apt to speak of the empires that maps made rather than its converse. To entertain this conceptual inversion is to foreground how the technologies of cartographic production—panoptic surveys, extraction and assimilation of incommensurable sensory stimuli, lines scored into formerly smooth intaglio printing plates, etc.—were dilated and ramified into technologies of colonial administration tout court. What Edney’s claim leaves unspoken—and what this paper aims to more robustly articulate—are the ways the larger aesthetic machinery of empire can be read off of the visual homunculus supplied by its underlying cartographic imaginaries. Maps, that is, not only mimetically delimit the architectonic parameters of colonial space, but also perform the rhetorical work of translating empire into a site of affective engagement and aesthetic intervention. Drawing on collections held in Britain and across the subcontinent, this paper tracks how imperial maps of British claims in South Asia self-consciously conflate disparate visual-rhetorical modes of blankness in order to transcend and transmute the map’s own epistemic limitations. Colonial maps, I argue, deploy an arsenal of formal tropes—blurry distinctions between proper and generic place names, reduplicated toponyms, and compositional skewing notably among them—to convert ambiguity from an epistemic problem to a primarily aesthetic one. Taking the performativity of the inscrutable, cartographic blank gaze seriously helps us recast British empire as a project that not only obsesses over its own epistemic failure but also, more strongly, recovers this failure as a motive condition of its intemperately expansionist place-making: of its maps’ dizzying ability to not just passively register or index space, but rather rhetorically produce it anew, as if from whole cloth.

This chapter focuses on the assembly of the highway network under the French Mandate and the effects that this infrastructure had on the spatial logic of the Lebanese state. It traces the emergence of Lebanon as a “roadblock state” in which state power was strongest at chokepoints along these infrastructural channels—especially points where the new highway network that Mandatory authorities assembled across the 1920s met the new borders imposed upon the post-Ottoman mashriq. This chapter relies on theories of state formation developed in studies of colonial and postcolonial Africa and the Caribbean. By taking a transnational and infrastructural approach to Lebanese state-formation, and by borrowing from studies of Africa and the Caribbean to do so, I aim to counter exceptionalizing tendencies within academic, policy, and popular discourse on Lebanon that attribute its distinctive historical trajectory to internal rather than relational processes. Moreover, centering the state in this way will further recent interventions by historians of Lebanon like Ziad Abu-Rish, Hicham Saffieddine, and Hannes Baumann, who have countered exceptionalizing narratives concerning the formation—or purported absence of the Lebanese state.

Drawing on the model of the University of Pennsylvania’s “Africana Classics” lectures, we hope to launch the Classic Texts Lecture as an annual opportunity for faculty to present on key works in their intellectual development, in the hopes of expanding the notion of a theoretical canon for CEGU. We encourage all students in our Colloquium community to attend, particularly those in the CEGU Graduate Certificate, in order to engage in lively discussion about the core questions and geographies that motivate our collective work and struggles.

Dr. Julie Michelle Klinger (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences at the University of Delaware, and a member of the International Standards Organization Technical Advisory Group 298: Rare Earth Supply Chain Transparency and Traceability. Dr. Klinger and her research team are supported by the National Science Foundation, The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Ford Foundation to conduct grounded yet global-scope research on competing uses for energy-transition metals, materials, and infrastructures. She has published numerous articles on rare earth elements, natural resource use, environmental politics, and outer space, including the award-winning 2018 book Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley.

Organized by the Urban Theory Lab and the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization at The University of Chicago.

Organized by the Neubauer Collegium, Department of Classics, and Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization at The University of Chicago

About the book:

Ecological crises threaten all forms of life on earth. Democracy too is endangered, as popular discontent, elite malfeasance, and unresponsive institutions imperil its survival. Present political concepts have proven inadequate to meeting these challenges, and their inadequacies are themselves symptoms of the failures of prevailing political, cultural, and ecological stories and practices.

This book offers a new vision of ecological and participatory democratic life for a time of crisis. Identifying myth and ritual as key resources for contemporary politics, Earthborn Democracy excavates practices and narratives that illustrate the interdependence necessary to inspire ecological renewal. It tells stories of multispecies agency and egalitarian political organization across history, from ancient Mesopotamia and the precolonial Americas to contemporary social movements, emphasizing Indigenous traditions and resistance. Resonating across these practices and stories past and present is a belief that we are all–human as well as nonhuman–earthborn, and this can serve as the basis for reimagining democracy. Allying visionary political theory with environmental activism, Earthborn Democracy provides a foundation and a guide for collective action in pursuit of earthly flourishing.

Co-sponsored by CEGU, the International Institute of Research in Paris, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, CNRS/IRL HumanitiesPlus, and the Department of English.

A much-acclaimed scholar, François Hartog is a French historian and Professor Emeritus of Modern and Antique Historiography at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. A former student of Jean-Pierre Vernant and assistant to Reinhart Koselleck, Hartog’s early work focused on the intellectual history of ancient Greece and historiography, while his recent work deals mainly with temporality, historicity, and the human condition in recent times. This discussion will be about his forthcoming book, Départager l’humanité, Humains, humanismes, inhumains (Paris: Gallimard, 2025).

For a copy of Professor Hartog’s paper, please write to cegu@uchicago.edu.

Organized by the Department of History, Department of Classics, Franke Institute for the Humanities, and Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization

Kohei Saito is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo and the author of Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto (2024), Marx in the Anthropocene (2023), and Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (2017).

This event is co-sponsored by CEGU, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, 3CT, the Practical Philosophy Workshop, the German Philosophy Workshop, and the Department of Philosophy.

CEGU's student-run magazine, Expositions, launches their seventh issue. Pick up a copy, have a bite to eat, and hear from the many writers, editors, photographers, illustrators, designers, and sound artists who contributed.

Ecology has become a subject of increasing concern among social and natural scientists in Japan as a result of climate change and disaster management. At the same time, the trend toward specialization of fields in university programs has made it rare for researchers in the social and natural sciences to meet and share ideas, let alone work together in the field. This symposium responds to this dilemma by creating a space for dialogue concerning ecology between the natural and social sciences in Japan. Drawing inspiration from thinkers such as Imanishi Kinji, whose research and writings bridged practice and theory, this group aims to develop an interdisciplinary conversation on topics related to ecology and the natural environment in Japan. To this end, the symposium brings together researchers from the social sciences and natural sciences.

Organized by UChicago Library and the Center for East Asian Studies.

Published in January 2024, Not In My Back Yard: How Citizen Activists Nationalized Local Politics in the Fight to Save Green Springs tells the story of “how a woman-led citizens’ group beat a Southern political machine by enlisting federal bureaucrats and judges to protect their neighborhood from unchecked economic development.”

This narrative delves into the local political activism shaping Green Springs, Virginia, chronicling the enduring struggle spanning decades to safeguard the area. It sheds light on the intricate economic compromises linked to environmental preservation, the genesis of NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) sentiment, the evolving dynamics of local governance, and the unexpected influence of historical narratives on public policy advancement.

Scholars have come to understand the colonies of Saint-Domingue, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and the larger French Antilles as sites of some of the most dynamic transformations of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. They were fertile grounds for subaltern intellectual generation and resistance–societies in which slavery, race, class, family, intimacy, fugitivity, commerce, and capitalism jostled against one another. This conference seeks to bring together scholars researching and developing new projects on these inherently unstable and violent spaces using the methodologies of social, economic, gender, and environmental history. Our presentations will collectively explore questions of scale as a historical and historiographic phenomenon: How did the realities of environmental degradation on a single Saint-Dominguan plantation inform discourses and flows of capital? How did illicit exchanges of essential goods shape larger regimes of commercial exchange and regulation? How did people of color use kinship networks to carve out economic, social, and bodily autonomy amidst the oppression of slavery and abolition? How did enslaved and free people of color use their knowledge of these islands to form communities of resistance with revolutionary potential? In asking questions that mediate between the individual and the global, we hope to illustrate how these small colonies served as vital nodes in global networks of commerce, kinship, and revolutionary fervor that both connected and ruptured the Atlantic world.

Sponsored by the Department of History, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Center for Latin American Studies, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, the France Chicago Center, and the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization.

Objectified: Methods in Environmental Humanities is an exhibition featuring selections from the Joel Snyder Materials Collection and beyond. The materials and objects included in the exhibition represent a reckoning with some of the planet’s most pressing concerns, from climate change to biodiversity loss, through humanistic inquiry.

Staged in the CWAC Exhibitions space on the 2nd floor of the Cochrane-Woods Art Center during Winter Quarter 2024 in collaboration with Dr. Jessica Landau and students in the Methods in Environmental Humanities seminar offered by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU), the exhibition foregrounds an interdisciplinary lens through which the contributors approach the environmental humanities. Students interrogate how humanistic disciplines such as art history, Indigenous studies, animal studies, comparative literature, and history serve as emerging methods through which we might understand the environment. Collectively, the student curators contemplate our everyday relationships with the built environment, natural resources, and stolen land through humanistic lines of inquiry.

To demonstrate how an interpretation can change depending on the methodological approach used or theoretical lens applied to an object, student curators were asked to produce two distinct labels using at least two different methodologies.

Join us for a lunchtime seminar on the remaking of Arctic seascapes as a frontier space for an expansive and growing ocean economy. The event will explore how the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas are paradoxically made increasingly valuable as they are made increasingly vulnerable to multiple pressures: polar-amplified warming, sea ice retreat, pollution, deep sea mining and drilling, surveying and surveillance, harvesting and over-exploitation at an unprecedented rate and scale.

Focusing primarily on the Norwegian context, the event will feature Tone Huse (Associate Professor, University of Tromsø) presenting work from her recent book Nature-made Economy (MIT Press 2023, with Kristin Asdal) on the commodification of Arctic cod as a prism for understanding the economization of the ocean, followed by Berit Kristoffersen (Associate Professor, University of Tromsø) and Alexander Arroyo (Affiliated Faculty CEGU/Senior Research Associate & Associate Director, Urban Theory Lab, University of Chicago) presenting research on the role of the ice edge in shaping new oil, gas, and (most recently) seabed mineral frontiers. Michael Watts (Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley), collaborator on this research, will act as moderator and provide a short commentary after the presentations.

Vegetarian boxed lunches will be provided.

Organized by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbnanization at The University of Chicago with support from the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics↗ offers a comprehensive overview of Latin American aesthetic and conceptual production addressing the more-than-human environment at the intersection between art, activism, and critique. Fields include literature, performance, film, and other audiovisual media as well as their interactions with community activisms. Scholars who have helped establish environmental approaches in the field as well as emergent critical voices revisit key concepts such as ecocriticism, (post-)extractivism, and multinaturalism, while opening new avenues of dialogue with areas including critical race theory and ethnicity, energy humanities, queer-*trans studies, and infrastructure studies, among others. This volume both traces these genealogies and maps out key positions in this increasingly central field of Latin Americanism, at the same time as they relate it to the environmental humanities at large.

By showing how artistic and literary productions illuminate critical zones of environmental thought, articulating urgent social and material issues with cultural archives, historical approaches and conceptual interventions, this volume offers cutting-edge critical tools for approaching literature and the arts from new angles that call into question the nature/culture boundary.

Individual and collective experiences of climate change are mediated simultaneously by embodied encounters with extreme weather events and by now-familiar abstractions of climate models and satellite imagery. As we grapple with the increasing dissonance between everyday life and epochal climatic and environmental change, how might we hold these intimate and remote forms of sensing in generative tension? How might we learn from the space between what we can touch, smell, see, or hear and what we can observe or study from afar? This event explores how the prescient work of sculptor Ruth Duckworth might guide us through that space, offering insight and inspiration for ways of knowing climate and its many forms of change through embodied aesthetic practice. In so doing, Duckworth points toward new forms of climate media attuned to the multiple scales of transformation– climatic, environmental, social, bodily– to which we must so urgently attend. 

Join us for a conversation with UChicago faculty and distinguished guests, sponsored by the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU)  and the Smart Museum of Art’s Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry.

The deep coal mine was the work site of Carboniferous geology. The richest evidence came not from the coal seams themselves but the shale layers that surrounded them. This meant that fossils came to light principally when tunnels collapsed. Fossil collection in the colliery was a high-risk activity associated with maintenance, repair, and danger to life and limb. The key figure in such work was the wasteman. The task of the wasteman was to walk the pits to survey the air courses and keep them in good repair. The wastemen also took stock of the stability of pillars and old workings. Sigillaria fossils posed a particular risk to colliers. Their heavy trunks frequently slipped out of the roof, leaving gaping holes, sometimes as wide as five feet in diameter. Constant surveillance of waste and shale was thus a critical task, vital to the security of the colliery and the lives of the people there. Yet references to the work of the wasteman are very rare in geological texts from the period. In natural theology, the divine work of the Creator took precedence and erased the social world of the collier. Fossils were seen as emblems of providential time, not products of the wasteman’s working day. Sigillaria and other coal plants had purged the atmosphere of surplus carbonic acid and deposited it in the Carboniferous strata. Thanks to the accumulation of carbon in the underground, the atmosphere of the planet had become “fit for the support of animal life, and human habitation.” Coal was not just the fuel of British wealth but also the life-giving force that had made the planet habitable. The erasure of the colliery worker from geology paved the way for a cosmology of carbon. At the same time as mining engineers and wastemen traced the gas flows inside the coalmine, geologists began to imagine God as the wasteman of the carbon cycle, regulating the atmosphere, channeling carbon back and forth through plants, earth, and air.

Information and communication technology (ICT) is already pervasive in virtually all aspects of everyday life and recent wide-scale availability of AI portends an accelerated reliance on a more digitalized world. Data centers are the backbone of ICT and concern about the energy-intensive equipment within these buildings has led to many legitimate concerns - along with sensational claims - over the environmental implications of a society increasingly reliant on data-intensive services.

This presentation will compare these oft-cited claims against previous Berkeley Lab research, which have historically shown much more modest growth in energy use owing to strong energy-efficiency trends, and present current research around emerging computing trends that require rethinking current sustainability efforts. The presentation will highlight decarbonization opportunities of the ICT industry as well as how ICT can be used to decarbonize other sectors.

The post-socialist period in East Central Europe was a period of rapid energy transition. From 1948-1989, states in this region relied almost exclusively on domestic coal for industrial and residential heating and electricity, in the process transforming their mining regions into some of the most toxic environments in the world. After 1989, as newly elected governments and foreign economic advisers privatized state industries through a process of “shock therapy,” wealthy investors bought majority shares in coal mining enterprises and shuttered many mines deemed unprofitable. Using records from the corporate archives of the successor company to the state’s largest coal enterprise, this paper traces the privatization process in Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic as an emblematic case study in social consequences of de-carbonization for energy workers. Under socialism, the state coal mining enterprise was sprawling; hundreds of houses, tens of thousands of apartments, dozens of cafeterias, clinics and hospitals, laundries, recreation centers, hotels, bus depots, dormitories, a travel agency, and even a seaside campground in Bulgaria, all available for free or at extremely low cost to energy workers and their families. The mine’s post-1989 owners concluded that these services must be “converted to a profit-making basis” and, in the process, transformed from rights to commodities.

This paper argues that the privatization process forced government officials, foreign economic advisers, and miners to resolve deep ontological questions: What is a coal mine? Who is a coal miner? Each group had a different answer arising from their divergent assumptions of what elements of the economy and human behavior are “natural.” Miners rejected the idea that economic competition is a natural human (and, indeed, manly) endeavor, arguing instead that “every man naturally seeks certainty in all spheres of life.” This paper treats the process of de-carbonization in post-socialist Czechoslovakia as an ambiguous transition. Cleaner energy and a healthier environment came yoked to new and profound uncertainty for energy workers, in which services workers had long taken as their right—housing, light, heat, leisure, medical care—became governed by the market. In the process, unemployment, homelessness, and poverty, once unimaginable to energy workers, became common.

Julia Mead is an environmental historian of Eastern Europe. She is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, “Socialist Rust Belt: Energy, Masculinity, and the End of Czechoslovak Socialism” traces the rise and fall of the Czechoslovak coal industry from 1948-2004 and its relationship to changing norms of masculinity.

The talk will examine how Friends of the Earth helped make Crested Butte, Colorado's fight against the multinational mining firm AMAX a household name in the 1970s (while neglecting to provide the same level of dug-in support to other communities that, unlike this town, were not inhabited by a nature-seeking group of white elites), asking about the possibilities and limitations of multiscalar activism seeking to move from local to global.

This event is co-sponsored by International House. Please note, this event will take place in person only. A recording will be made available shortly afterwards.

In a moment of world-destroying environmental breakdown, political actors are increasingly claiming that nature should have rights. What are the political stakes of these claims? Against their scholarly critics, who contend that extending rights to nature is a philosophically incoherent idea and thus politically ineffective, I contend that when political actors claim that nature should have rights, they are not attempting to extend rights to a new class of subjects but potentially transforming the concept of rights. This is not to say that nature simply can have rights; I agree that nature’s rights encounter “conceptual strain," both hold that this does not entail that nature’s rights could never “make sense.” If we understand nature’s rights not as a pre-linguistic and pre-political concept, but rather as an everyday practice of making political claims, we can see how these performative acts of democratic persuasion might make sense anew. Innovating at the fuzzy boundary between the rule-bound and radically open character of language, claims that nature should have rights defamiliarize the grammar of both rights and nature.

Garbage is often assumed to be an inevitable part and problem of human existence. But when did people actually come to think of things as “trash”—as becoming worthless over time or through use, as having an end?

Unmaking Waste tackles these questions through a long-term, cross-cultural approach. Drawing on archaeological finds, historical documents, and ethnographic observations to examine Europe, the United States, and Central America from prehistory to the present, Sarah Newman traces how different ideas about waste took shape in different times and places. Newman examines what people consider to be “waste” and how they interact with it, as well as what happens when different perceptions of trash come into conflict. Conceptions of waste have shaped forms of reuse and renewal in ancient Mesoamerica, early modern ideas of civility and forced religious conversion in New Spain, and even the modern discipline of archaeology. Newman argues that centuries of assumptions imposed on other places, times, and peoples need to be rethought. This book is not only a broad reconsideration of waste; it is also a call for new forms of archaeology that do not take garbage for granted. Unmaking Waste reveals that waste is not—and never has been—an obvious or universal concept.

Please join CEGU, the Center for International Social Science Research (CISSR), and the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) for a roundtable discussion and reception with the author at International House.

How did uplands, often presumed inhospitable to agriculture, set limits to and provide opportunities for the cultivation of crops? How did mountain people address the difficulties and utilize and shape the upland environment when cultivating hill- and mountainsides? This article goes beyond two lines of well-established scholarship on upland cultivation in general: one that focuses on typically mountain businesses including lumbering, mining, and hunting; the other on environmental degradation as the result of agricultural cultivation. Instead, by focusing on aspects such as infertility, limited water supply, cold temperature, and elevation in late imperial upland Southeast China, this article discusses the ways in which the agricultural cultivators made efforts to deal with the unforgiving environment. It also reveals how the cultivators utilized various seemingly adverse elements in the uplands, such as cliffs and shadowed space, to their advantage.

By the sixteenth century, most of the fertile bottomland in the valleys and basins and some of the easily accessible hillsides in upland Southeast China had been cultivated into paddy fields. Thereafter, against the context of rapid population growth, a large number of people sojourned in this region and went to great lengths to cultivate deep mountains with food and cash crops, including indigo, tobacco, and New World food crops. Through a close examination of the materiality of mountains and the technicality of mountain people’s cultivation activities, this article contributes to a better understanding of making a living in this complex environment through agriculture.

Yiyun Peng received her PhD in history from Cornell University in August 2023 and joined the Department of History at UChicago after graduation as a postdoctoral fellow. She is mainly interested in environmental history, the history of technology, and economic history. While her main focus is on China, she has also been doing research on Southeast Asia, in particular the Malay world. Her dissertation works on a few cash crops and the handicraft industries processing them into commodities—indigo dye, bamboo paper, tobacco, and ramie (a fiber plant) cloth—led to a herbaceous revolution in upland Southeast China from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century, which profoundly transformed the region’s environment and society. The dissertation is a winner of the Messenger Chalmers Prize for the best dissertation in the Department of History at Cornell University.

"Our book offers a new interpretation of the idea of scarcity in economic thought. We explain how modern economics arrived at its influential axiom of scarcity - infinite wants in a finite world - and also why this peculiar definition has no claim to universal validity. There are many other ways of imagining the relation between nature and the economy. We demonstrate the historical contingency of neoclassical scarcity by reconstructing the intellectual and environmental context of a dozen alternative conceptions of scarcity across 500 years of European thought. Our book ends with a plea for a new kind of economics oriented towards ecological repair rather than infinite growth."

This event is co-organized by the Center for International Social Science Research (CISSR) and the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU).

This conference aims to bring to campus scholars conducting cutting-edge research on the Amazonian region in the United States today. Our purpose is to present scholars from a range of fields in the Humanities and Social Sciences in order to provide to the university’s academic community a panorama of the questions, themes, and problems that have been guiding current scholarship and cultural production on the Amazon. How is the region’s history, from the late-nineteenth-century rubber boom to the expanding deforestation of the 1970s, present in contemporary inquiries? What is the role of Indigenous thought and cultural production, including visual arts as well as film and verbal arts, in today’s Amazonian and international cultural scenes? How has the Amazon become a fertile ground for the production of speculative fiction? In a region where Indigenous presence has received so much attention, how to account for the large and vibrant presence of Black and other brown populations?

This event is co-sponsored by CEGU, the Center for Latin American Studies, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and the Franke Institute for the Humanities.

This book talk discusses Eleana Kim’s recently published ethnography of the ecologies of the South Korean borderlands, in areas adjacent the Korean Demilitarized Zone. Based on fieldwork with ecologists, environmentalists, and residents who live along the border, this book reframes the Korean DMZ and the national division around more-than-human peace. It also argues that militarized ecologies deserve greater attention in the context of climate crisis and the convergence of militarization and privatization at a planetary scale.

Eleana Kim is a sociocultural anthropologist and professor of anthropology and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ (2022) and Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (2010), both published by Duke University Press. She currently serves as the president of the Society for Cultural Anthropology.

The 2023 Weissbourd Annual Conference will explore questions of value, as well as practical and normative issues, concerning human communities' relationship with the environment and other animals in it.

“The Intimate City is a joyful miscellany of people seeing things in the urban landscape, the streets alive with remembrances and ideas even when those streets are relatively empty of people.”—Robert Sullivan, New York Times Book Review

As New York came to a halt with COVID, Kimmelman composed an email to a group of architects, historians, writers, and friends, inviting them to take a walk. Wherever they liked, he wrote—preferably someplace meaningful to them, someplace that illuminated the city and what they loved about it. At first, the goal was distraction. At a scary moment when everything seemed uncertain, walking around New York served as a reminder of all the ways the city was still a rock, joy, and inspiration. What began with a lighthearted trip to explore Broadway’s shuttered theater district and a stroll along Museum Mile when the museums were closed soon took on a much larger meaning and ambition. These intimate, funny, richly detailed conversations between Kimmelman and his companions became anchors for millions of Times readers during the pandemic. The walks unpacked the essence of urban life and its social fabric—the history, plans, laws, feats of structural engineering, architectural highlights, and everyday realities that make up a place Kimmelman calls “humanity’s greatest achievement.”

Filled with stunning photographs documenting the city during the era of COVID, The Intimate City is the ultimate insider’s guide. The book includes new walks through LGBTQ Greenwich Village, through Forest Hills, Queens, and Mott Haven, in the Bronx. All the walks can be walked, or just be read for pleasure, by know-it-all New Yorkers or anyone else. They take readers back to an age when Times Square was still a beaver pond and Yankee Stadium a salt marsh; across the Brooklyn Bridge, for green tea ice cream in Chinatown, for momos and samosas in Jackson Heights, to explore historic Black churches in Harlem and midcentury Mad Men skyscrapers on Park Avenue. A kaleidoscopic portrait of an enduring metropolis, The Intimate City reveals why New York, despite COVID and a long history of other calamities, continues to inspire and to mean so much to those who call it home and to countless others.

Michael Kimmelman is the architecture critic of The New York Times. He has reported from more than 40 countries, was previously The Times's chief art critic and, based in Berlin, created the Abroad column, covering cultural and political affairs across Europe and the Middle East. Twice a Pulitzer Prize finalist, he is the founder and editor-at-large of a new venture focused on global challenges and progress called Headway.

When climate change, aging infrastructure and an affordable housing crisis pose existential threats to our cities and society, why has it become so difficult to get big things done? Are some of the very rules and regulations put in place to solve these sorts of problems getting in the way? A look at the troubled aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in New York City, at some of the obstacles to addressing homelessness, and at some challenges to the construction of subsidized housing around the country.

Michael Kimmelman is the architecture critic of The New York Times. He has reported from more than 40 countries, was previously The Times's chief art critic and, based in Berlin, created the Abroad column, covering cultural and political affairs across Europe and the Middle East. Twice a Pulitzer Prize finalist, he is the founder and editor-at-large of a new venture focused on global challenges and progress called Headway.

Science and liberalism appear to be bound more and more tightly as the crises of the present moment, from the pandemic to severe weather events, make painfully clear. This conference begins from the observation that liberalism and science have always been linked in ways that are both explicit and unspoken. At the same time that historical scholarship has laid bare the genealogies of liberalism in relation to colonialism, racism, and capitalism, science studies scholars and historians of science have revealed the many ways that science is produced and bounded by the social worlds it inhabits. In light of these critical traditions, we will bring together a diverse group of scholars to explore two related themes.

First, we will interrogate the ways “science” furnishes the liberal world with many of its key features, including for example individuality, diversity, autonomy/choice, and security. In other words, taking seriously the critical genealogies of liberalism that have emerged in recent years, we will examine the role of the sciences in that history of liberalism.

Second, we will attempt to make explicit the decidedly liberal contexts in which our fields have taken shape, with the aim of understanding how this context may have limited our collective understanding of the histories of science, technology and medicine. Our goal is to move past the idea that there is a single choice – either critique science rigorously but risk giving ammunition to illiberal forces or defend science as a part of liberal technocracy’s last gasping breaths. Both options serve liberalism. Maybe there are new ways to do critical scholarship on science.

Please visit the conference website↗ for full details.

This event is organized by the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge and co-sponsored by CEGU.

An exploration of the subaltern ecologies of the Enlightenment that explores the lost world of artisanal and peasant knowledge rivaling eighteenth-century political economy and natural history. Based on the forthcoming Les savoirs perdus de l'économie: contribution à l'équilibre du vivant, Gallimard, NRF essais.

Sponsored by the Department of History and CEGU

In this public dialogue, two of the leading social theorists of our time discuss the origins, manifestations and consequences of environmental crisis on our rapidly warming planet.

Over the last decade, political theorist Nancy Fraser and historical geographer Jason W. Moore have been among the most influential and systematic proponents of the claim that contemporary environmental emergencies are best understood in relation to—and as a direct expression of—capitalism’s underlying crisis-tendencies. On this understanding, the accumulation of capital is not simply a social or economic process that engenders damaging ecological effects. Rather, capital is itself a way of organizing nature, and thus environmental disasters such as global warming and biodiversity loss reflect its systematic devaluation or “cheapening” of the entire planetary web of life in both human and nonhuman forms. These operations are obscured, they argue, in dominant market-centric and technoscientific discourses, which treat nature as an exterior parameter or infinitely renewable resource supply for human consumption. In contrast, Fraser and Moore seek to draw attention to the “hidden abodes” of human and nonhuman reproductive work that support the operations of capital, and indeed, life itself on planet earth.

Moore and Fraser have been developing closely parallel lines of argument and discussing each other’s work for quite some time. In this conversation, moderated Professor Aaron Jakes of the Department of History, these eminent scholars will share the stage to consider what their respective approaches to an account of “capitalism’s natures” might offer to scholarship on the climate crisis, and to ongoing struggles to create more equitable, democratic, and livable ways of organizing our shared planetary existence.

Please note, this event will take place in person only. A recording will be made available shortly afterwards.

Please join us to celebrate Nancy Fraser’s recent book, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It (Verso Books, 2022). Fraser will be joined in conversation by CEGU faculty Ryan Cecil Jobson as interlocutor and Lisa Wedeen as moderator.

Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life–guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy.

What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital— and starve it to death.

This event is co-organized by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) and CEGU.

Please note, this event will take place in person only.

Jason W. Moore is an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, where he is professor of sociology and leads the World-Ecology Research Collective. He is author or editor, most recently, of Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), Capitalocene o Antropocene? (Ombre Corte, 2017), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (PM Press, 2016), and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press, 2017).

The organizers request that attendees read Jason Moore’s paper in advance. Click here to access the paper.

The burgeoning bottled water industry presents a paradox: Why do people choose expensive, environmentally destructive bottled water, rather than cheaper, sustainable, and more rigorously regulated tap water? The Profits of Distrust links citizens' choices about the water they drink to civic life more broadly, marshalling a rich variety of data on public opinion, consumer behavior, political participation, geography, and water quality. Basic services are the bedrock of democratic legitimacy. Failing, inequitable basic services cause citizen-consumers to abandon government in favor of commercial competitors. This vicious cycle of distrust undermines democracy while commercial firms reap the profits of distrust – disproportionately so from the poor and racial/ethnic minority communities. But the vicious cycle can also be virtuous: excellent basic services build trust in government and foster greater engagement between citizens and the state. Rebuilding confidence in American democracy starts with literally rebuilding the basic infrastructure that sustains life.

Please join CEGU for a discussion between co-author Manny Teodoro and CEGU Director of Academic Programs Sabina Shaikh for a conversation about the book at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore.

The historical geographies of extractivism and empire cut across the division between “Global North” and “Global South.” This roundtable brings together scholars working on the Russian and North American Arctic, Brazil, and Lebanon for a conversation across regions rarely placed in the same frame. We will trace the surprising parallels and uncanny connections between histories of energy extraction and ecological transformation on very different colonial and capitalist resource frontiers. We will explore, too, sources of hope: the nodes of resistance and alternative imaginaries generated by projects of Indigenous and decolonial worldmaking.

This session of the Environmental Studies Workshop is co-sponsored by the Urban Theory Lab and the Neubauer Collegium Project on Fossil Capitalism on the Global South.

Climate change is dramatically transforming the planet’s coastal terrains, rendering densely settled communities, vibrant ecosystems, and large-scale infrastructure vulnerable to an unprecedented range of threats. Insofar as coastlines typically constitute the borders of national states and their geopolitical operations, they are also at the core of planetary environmental, economic and societal transformations. From industrial ports, large-scale metropolitan regions and long-distance transportation corridors to coastal fishing villages, mudflats, wetlands, and marshes, coastlines represent multidimensional spaces of interface between heterogeneous ecologies and infrastructural configurations; national, regional and urban economies; multinational corporations; diverse forms of territorial governance; and regionally embedded circuits of social reproduction. These vital but delicate spaces are in peril.

How should we understand these transformations? What are their implications for inherited forms of social life, spatial organization, and territorial governance? What kinds of interventions might be imagined and mobilized to mitigate their effects not only upon coastlines, but upon the planet as a whole?

This panel brings together scholars from diverse fields—including urban planning, anthropology, sociology, landscape design, and architecture—whose work addresses emerging coastal vulnerabilities, transformations and crises in various sites around the world; their uneven social and spatial impacts; and emergent strategic responses. It will present an interdisciplinary conversation with the aim of generating new approaches to understanding—and shaping—the rapidly mutating environmental conditions of our time.

Following the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), UN secretary-general António Guterres declared that the earth “is on a fast track to climate disaster.” In order to avoid “tipping points that could lead to cascading and irreversible climate impacts,” secretary-general Guterres advocated an accelerated shift to renewable energy sources and a rapid downscaling of fossil fuel production and consumption. However, even as catastrophic floods, storms, heatwaves and fires proliferate across the planet, accompanied by devastating human suffering, population displacement, landscape destruction, and infrastructure damage, the fossil fuel industry remains globally dominant. While some governments seek to accelerate the transition to renewable energy and more sustainable social arrangements, many powerful states continue to subsidize fossil fuels and to grant permits for their continued exploration and extraction. Amidst these contradictory tendencies, climate activists and citizens around the world continue to develop strategies to protest the status quo, to pressure governments to limit or ban CO2-emitting machines, and to repair the massive social and environmental damage induced during the “long fossil boom” of the last 150 years.

Against the background of these intense transformations, crises and struggles, this panel of CEGU faculty considers the contribution of social science and humanities research to our ability to understand—and to shape—emergent environmental conditions, from the local to the planetary scales. The panel brings together scholars from diverse disciplinary locations—archeology, anthropology, economics, English, creative writing, geography, political ecology, philosophy, and public policy—to dialogue and debate about contemporary climate emergencies, their historical genealogies, their uneven geographies, their emergent dynamics, and their future implications. This event represents the first in a year-long series of discussions organized by CEGU to support research, teaching, and public dialogue about the social, historical, spatial and (geo)political dimensions of contemporary environmental transformations and crises.

People who have social and affective connections to a multiplicity of geographical locations, such as immigrants, are often portrayed as dwelling and being torn between places. In his recent book, The Diasporic Condition (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Ghassan Hage argues that this is not always the case; that rather than being torn between two or three places people are also capable of dwelling in all these places at the same time. One needs to pluralize one’s conception of what it means to dwell in and occupy a place, and the idea of inhabiting simultaneously a multiplicity of locations becomes easier to conceive. But to what extent do we all inhabit a multiplicity of realities? And if we do, what are the critical analytical consequences of approaching social existence in this way?

Ghassan Hage is professor of anthropology and social theory at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He is the author of several books, including White Nation, Against Paranoid Nationalism, After-Politics, and Is Racism an Environmental Threat?

Organized by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT); co-sponsored by the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, the Department of Anthropology, and CEGU 

Organized by the Program on the Global Environment and the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights; co-sponsored by CEGU

Organized by the Department of Sociology; co-sponsored by CEGU