CEGU

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.

Environmental activist and lawyer Eddie Ahn discusses his graphic novel, Advocate: A Graphic Memoir of Family, Community, and the Fight for Environmental Justice.

Register here.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Work through your ideas and interests to start developing a topic for your CEGU BA thesis!

Work through your ideas and interests to start developing a topic for your CEGU BA thesis!

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.

Hear from three CEGU/ENST alumni on the experience of writing a thesis and the start of their careers following graduation from UChicago.

Food will be provided! Registration is required.

Join us in celebrating the start of Winter Quarter over coffee, hot chocolate, and donuts from Stan’s!

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.

A CEGU Classics Lecture on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy (1988).

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.

This talk examines the material relations through which contemporary human engagements with outer space are being produced across four constitutive sites: mines, discarded electronics, launch sites, and asteroids. Drawing together literatures on waste, discard, supply chains, and frontiers with fieldwork in several mining and/or launch sites in China, Sweden, the United States and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it argues that waste-making is constitutive of a set of contemporary space activities and shapes the manner in which the immensity of the cosmos is understood and engaged by diverse publics. The talk presents a conceptual architecture and also reflexively examines the potential epistemic violence of waste-making as a spatial analytic to link Earthly and outer space geographies. 

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.

This presentation will focus on how coastal communities of the Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe in antiquity related to the sea after the occurrence of coastal disasters. Many of these communities perceived the sea as a living entity, endowed with agency and occasionally displaying aggressive tendencies. The Gulf of Cádiz, in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, is taken as a case study. This coastal landscape is characterized by wide floodplains and powerful tides, which throughout antiquity was also punctuated by high-energy events, both large storm surges and tsunamis. This scenario offers a privileged setting to reflect on the triangulation of humanity, ecosystems and the divine from a longue durée perspective. The way in which the coastal communities of the Gulf of Cadiz, from the Late Bronze Age to the present, have managed their responses to catastrophic marine flooding in religious and ritual terms not only allows for a reflection on the relationships between human agency and the more-than-human agency of the sea. It is also an exponent, in the theoretical framework of the Blue Humanities, of the agency of the sea as a veritable “hyperobject.”

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

Join us for CEGU‘s annual Open House! Meet with CEGU faculty and staff to learn more about our major, minor, course offerings, events, and more!

Register here.↗

Joel Alden Schlosser will discuss Earthborn Democracy: A Political Theory of Entangled Life. He will be joined in conversation by Evan H. Carver. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

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.

The relationship of water to power takes shape across plural scales of space and time, and in the urban context, this relationship has governed how cities have been designed, constructed, represented, and operated over the millennia. These keynotes will open up a dialogue surrounding the relationship of water and power; they will serve to open a binational symposium addressing challenges facing urban watersheds across the globe in a time of climate change and the diminishing effectiveness of regulatory apparatuses—when urban rivers, long treated as waste sinks and logistics systems, are being sporadically reclaimed for wildlife and recreation, but also as scenographic instruments of gentrification. The conversation between da Cunha and Havrelock will foreground the role of urban watersheds as vital agents within cities as well as ideological instruments, and challenge the extractivist and colonial perspective that has governed their treatment in the modern age.

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.

The last and largest slave society in the Americas, Brazil is now the world’s largest agricultural economy and its most unequal, with inequalities organized along clearly racialized lines. This talk, entitled “On Ruralization in Brazilian Politics,” explores how rural spaces became central to new forms of economic exploitation and social domination after the abolition of slavery. Although often imagined as an evanescent intermediary step between the primitive and the modern, the rural has continued to grow and has proliferated in Brazilian political economic and social life. In 1993, the geographer Milton Santos wrote that “modern Brazil is a nation in which the agricultural population is growing faster than the rural population.” Yet today, an increasing number of the representatives in Brazil’s legislature describe themselves as “ruralistas” or ruralists. And paradoxically, it is ruralism which most perfectly embodies the oligopolist techno-scientific agrarian economy which Santos associated with an increasingly divided and unequal society. If the rural and the urban have apparently traded places then, the racial connotations of the rural have also been symbolically inverted, due in part to a politics of rural dispossession that foreclosed Black access to landed property and environmental resources in the long-century after abolition. “On Ruralization” explores how dispossession has taken place not just through the enclosure of land and commodification of land-based resources, but also via the appropriation of environmental work in its productive and reproductive capacities. The talk details how knowledge developed by agronomists, geographers, and ecologists working in fields from bovine genetics to conservation ecology legitimated scientific authority over new types of social labor and value at the scale not of the individual subject or even the species, but rather at the level of the environment or ecology.

Come learn more about CEGU’s BA Capstone track from Instructional Professor and Director of Community Studies, Mary Beth Pudup. This is a required info session for Capstone track students.

Register here.↗

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

Hosted by Chicago Studies as a part of their Urban Hikes & Bikes events, this 21-mile Fall tour takes participants on deep dives into the stories of key figures and significant places across the South and Near West Sides of the city, traversing neighborhoods that include Hyde Park, Bronzeville, Bridgeport, and the Near West Side.

Registration is free and required. Click here to learn more and register.↗

Stop by the CEGU table during the Academic Opportunities Fair to learn more about upcoming courses, events, student opportunities, and more. 

Stop by the Urban Lounge for free lunch from Saucy Porka! 

Join us on Friday, May 24th for the CEGU BA Thesis & Capstone Symposium, to be followed by an end-of-year celebration in the 1155 courtyard. 

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.

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.

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.

What if our understanding of capitalism and climate is back to front? What if the problem is not that transitioning to renewables is too expensive, but that saving the planet is not sufficiently profitable? This is my claim. The global economy is moving too slowly toward sustainability because the return on green investment is too low. Today's consensus is that the key to curbing climate change is to produce green electricity and electrify everything possible. The main economic barrier in that project has seemingly been removed. But while prices of solar and wind power have tumbled, the golden era of renewables has yet to materialize. The problem is that investment is driven by profit, not price, and operating solar and wind farms remains a marginal business, dependent everywhere on the state's financial support. We cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood remain unappetizing. But there is an alternative to providing surrogate green profits through subsidies: to take energy out of the private sector's hands. An essential intervention, The Price Is Wrong is as politically far-reaching as it is factually illuminating.

Presented in affiliation with the Economic Planning and Democratic Politics project at the Neubauer Collegium

Join CEGU and Chicago Studies for our weekly Cookie & Coffee Break in the Urban Lounge at 1155 E. 60th Street. Students are welcome to use this time for studying, collaborating on projects, advising with faculty and staff, or simply hanging out! Free cookies and coffee will always be provided. We hope to see you there! 

This Earth Day, join us for an engaging evening in the Urban Lounge as we reconnect with UChicago alumni and explore the impact of the university on their experience after graduating. We will explore the pivotal experiences during their time as an undergraduate that shaped their careers, how they cultivated Chicago-based connections, and the skills crucial for success in their current paths. This event will feature alumni from a diverse array of fields, providing the opportunity for students to foster personal connections and explore shared experiences with alumni. Dinner will be provided. 

A dilapidated cotton warehouse owned by Huntsville Prison in East Texas became the home to over a million bats in the 1990s. This state-protected urban bat colony now poses a public health threat to both the residents of the town and the men imprisoned across the street. Human life and wildlife are treated as worlds apart even in their shared ecological reality: as unlivable heat worsens every summer, the inmates are denied air-conditioning and animal migratory patterns are drastically altered, but only the bats are advocated for by the state of Texas.

 

My dissertation is a historically oriented anthropological investigation of Texas’ ecology and the ecologists who study it. It is particularly interested in the settler colonial formation of “the range” as an ecological, geographic, mythical, and political landscape. I propose to present material from the third chapter of the dissertation to CEGU’s workshop, which explores the study and management of human-wildlife conflicts in Texas—what I call their arrangements. My ethnography of the state-employed ecologists called in to resolve the conflict at the Huntsville prison serves as this chapter’s central example. By exploring the way scientists navigate the boundaries of humans and animals, species and race, prisoners and pests, and protection and threat in this complicated terrain and within this case study, I ask how health – of animals, Texans, and the state as a whole – is configured and re-configured on the range and under the conditions of runaway climate change.

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.

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.

My current book project, Unsafe Harbour: A Political Ecology of Postwar Marseille, is rooted in the intersecting histories of industrial pollution, economic development, and urban planning. Pulling together these various research threads is a lawsuit concerning ricin poisoning at Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse. As an iconic embodiment of all that was promised by modernity, the building serves as a starting point for thinking about the various postwar projects that attempted to forestall economic decline, from the expansion of port facilities on the periphery to gentrification efforts in the centre. By examining the environmental fallout of these projects, this research contributes to our understanding of how the logic of extractivism has shaped the fortunes of the city and its people.

Venus Bivar was recently appointed to the University of Oxford's first dedicated post in environmental history. Her research interests lie at the intersection of economic history and the environment, and in particular she is interested in the extraction of natural resources, industrial pollution, and economic growth. She is currently writing a book on the environmental consequences of the rise of petrochemicals in postwar Marseille. Her first book, Organic Resistance: The Struggle Over Industrial Farming in Postwar France (UNC Press 2018), was awarded the J. Russell Major Prize from the American Historical Association, as well as an honourable mention for the Society for French Historical Studies' Pinkney Prize, and was shortlisted for both the Canadian Historical Association's Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, and the Council for European Studies' Book Award.

Join journalists from the the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for a lunchtime conversation on careers in climate journalism. Miho Ouyou is a Journalist and Post-Grad Reporting Fellow and Minsha Ouyou is a Journalist and Guest Contributor. The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is a news media organization established in 2006 that sponsors independent reporting on global issues that other media outlets are less willing or able to undertake on their own. The Center’s goal is to raise the standard of coverage on international, systemic crises and to do so in a way that engages both the broad public and government policymakers. Lunch will be provided.

Recent publications:

• Japan’s Seafood Producers Are Feeling the Economic Fallout of China’s Ban on Imports↗
• Japan’s Plan To Discharge Radioactive Water Into the Sea Worries Residents↗

Join organizers and authors of CEGU's Exposions Magazine for the launch of our sixth issue. Hear from contributors, meet the team, pick up a copy, and enjoy some refreshments.

From 1986 to 2002, Japan has offered three rounds of financial and technological assistances in building and expanding Changchun’s second Water Purification Plant (WPP). With Japan’s assistances, this regional capital in Northeast China is equipped with a world-class water filtration system that provides crystal clear and clean drinking water to its residents. As the last chapter of my book manuscript (Japan’s Infrastructure Empire), this paper explores the history behind such assistances and show how imperial infrastructure building casts a long shadow in the former colonies as the imperial infrastructure established water standards and internalized a form of understanding of infrastructure. Moreover, this chapter concludes the book by pointing out issues associated with this infrastructure-centered approach in addressing social, political, and ecological problems. The positive consideration of infrastructure as a solution in both Japan further twists the view of the imperial past and provides an insufficient method in the face of current climate crisis. 

Yuting Dong is an assistant professor in the Department of History and CEGU. Her research focuses on Japan’s empire, infrastructure studies, history of labor and of expertise. Before joining Chicago’s history department in 2021, she received her doctoral degree from Harvard University. Her work is published in Modern Asian Studies, Technology and Culture, and International Journal of Asian Studies.

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.

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.

This chapter provides a new reading of the intricate relationship between Montaigne’s two essays on the New World, “Of Cannibals” and “Of Coaches”, arguing that their affective grounding allowed Montaigne to formulate an anti-colonial, ecological critique of the conquest. From an attention to environmental change in “Of Cannibals” that reveals a critique of expansionism centered on one plagiarized anecdote, to a carefully constructed lexicon of sustainability throughout both essays that reflects on the risks of overloading nature and on limits, I argue that, ultimately, both essays denounce colonization as a movement of subjugation and violence. Montaigne exposes how, by confusing human beings and nonhuman environment as resources, Europeans have rendered themselves insensitive to their responsibility in processes of devastation that have only grown larger to this day.

On November 30th, 2023, the United Arab Emirates convened the 28th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—COP28 for short—in Dubai. Over the course of two weeks, negotiators from almost 200 nations took stock of progress made since the 2015 Paris Agreement—too slow, and not enough—and debated ways to transition away from fossil fuels—a debate influenced, no doubt, by the overwhelming presence of fossil fuel industry lobbyists and their political allies. Despite strenuous disagreement between delegates and scathing critique from activists, in his closing remarks on December 13th UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell proclaimed that COP28 signalled the “beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era.

But amidst such mixed messages emerging from COP, are there other signals in the noise? What really happened offstage? What were activists and other unsanctioned participants demanding, and why? Are carbon markets and other market-based technofixes the only answer? What can we learn from COP28 from the bottom-up? Come join students from UChicago’s COP28 delegation and Professor Berit Kristofferson (UiT, Norway) to get an inside story on the politics of climate change and discuss the way forward.

Nothing could seem more contemporary than climate change. Yet, in Chaos in the Heavens (Verso, 2024), Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher show that we have been thinking about and debating the consequences of our actions upon the environment for centuries. The subject was raised wherever history accelerated: by the Conquistadors in the New World, by the French revolutionaries of 1789, by the scientists and politicians of the nineteenth century, by the European imperialists in Asian and Africa until the Second World War. Climate change was at the heart of fundamental debates about colonization, God, the state, nature, and capitalism. From these intellectual and political battles emerged key concepts of contemporary environmental science and policy. For a brief interlude, science and industry instilled in us the reassuring illusion of an impassive climate. But, in the age of global warming, we must, once again, confront the chaos in the heavens.

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a historian at the CNRS in Paris. He is the author of Happy Apocalypse. A history of technological risk; The Shock of the Anthropocene (with C. Bonneuil); Chaos in the heavens (with Fabien Locher) and Sans transition. Une nouvelle histoire de l’énergie.

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.

Energize is The University of Chicago’s largest annual networking event for undergraduate students interested in energy and the environment.

10+ employer partners from renewable energy to local non-profits will be joining us for fireside conversations, small group coffee chats, and an open, ‘career fair’ networking event. This will be your top chance in the 2023-2024 academic year to learn about internship opportunities, meet alumni working in the environmental and energy fields, and discuss full-time opportunities.

Participating Partners

• 174 Power Global
• Argonne National Laboratory
• Acciona
• Comed/Exelon
• Field Museum
• LanzaTech
• Marathon Capital
• Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago
• New Energy Nexus
• The Nature Conservancy
• Urban Rivers
• Valor Infrastructure Partners

Join us for a BA Thesis Alumni Panel to hear directly from recent grads about tackling the thesis process and transitioning to the professional world after college. Alumni will share insights on research, writing strategies, and overcoming common hurdles related to methodologies and data collection. They'll also discuss their career paths since graduation. This is a great chance to get personalized advice and ask questions as you progress through your own thesis and post-graduation journey. Food will be provided!

Panelists

• Ruby Rorty, “Is There a Legal Path to Environmental Justice? Movement-Building, Strategic Litigation, and a Case Study of Chicago’s General Iron Dispute.”
• Kimika Padilla, “Bird’s Eye View: Local Perspective from a Case Study of Aerial Cable Cars in Bogotá, Colombia.”
• Micah Wilcox, “Major ‘L’: How the Chicago Transit Authority Gentrified Its Elevated Trains.”

In December, the Energy Policy Institute at The University of Chicago (EPIC) and The University of Chicago Office of Career Advancement sponsored student delegates from the College, Booth, Harris, and Law School to attend the COP28 international climate change conferencein Dubai.

Join us for an in-depth conversation about COP, the issues, the experiences of our students, and the role you can play as a climate champion.

Persons with disabilities who may need assistance should contact International House in advance of the program at (773) 753-2274 or i-house-programs@uchicago.edu

The summer of 2023 was the hottest ever recorded on planet earth and—wait for it—next summer is expected to be hotter. Seemingly every extreme weather event—be it wildfires, flooding, or heat emergencies—is greeted as the “new normal” instead of what it should be: a clarion call for collective study and action. This event takes up that challenge and creates a CEGU forum for student-driven conversations that grapple with the climate and nature emergency as it is happening. This is an invitation to talk about root causes of the emergency, map efforts underway to address those causes and finally and urgently, imagine alternative futures.

The event will begin with a brief introduction by CEGU faculty + students and will move on to an open discussion and brainstorm about what kinds of student-led CEGU initiatives and events we can develop to address the climate-nature emergency. Come ready to share ideas and get inspired! Snacks and drinks will be provided.

This event is part of the Frizzell Family Learning & Speaker Series.

Join organizers and authors of CEGU's Exposions Magazine for the launch of a special issue in collaboration with the Chicago Studies research project, Century on 55th Street. Hear from contributors, meet the team, pick up a copy, and enjoy some refreshments.

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.

Are you a 4th year thesis or capstone writer interested in using your project to explore a future career? Are you a 3rd year student thinking about the thesis and capstone options? In this workshop, we will discuss how to tailor your BA thesis or capstone to post-graduation pathways related to cities and the environment. While the BA thesis should stand on its own in terms of research and design, it may be useful to orient your paper towards various careers, especially those that might require or allow for the submission of a writing sample. Over the course of an hour, we’ll discuss how to select sources, methods, and visualizations that signal to a given audience your understanding of the field—whether it be urban planning, academic research, policy, consulting, or beyond. The goal will be to identify a strong audience and build some next steps towards putting your thesis or capstone paper in conversation with these careers.

All those currently seeking to earn a CEGU Doctoral Certificate are obliged to attend.  Anyone interested in the CEGU Doctoral Certificate are welcome. Attendance in person is preferred, but if you are unable to attend in person, the meeting will be also available via Zoom. You will receive a link upon submitting the registration form.

CEGU students, faculty, and friends are invited for a night at the museum to discover and engage the work of Ruth Duckworth in the Smart Museum’s exhibition Ruth Duckworth: Life As A Unity.

This is a social event for students and faculty across the University from CEGU to the arts and humanities to the physical and biological sciences to mingle, exchange ideas, and get to know each other as well as one of UChicago’s most influential faculty artists, Ruth Duckworth, who was deeply embedded in the Department of Geophysical Sciences and Hyde Park’s burgeoning climate activist community in the 1960s.

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 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.

Happy Autumn Quarter! Join us in celebrating the beginning of the academic year with our Fall social event, hiking at the Indiana Dunes. Led by UChicago Alum and President of the Chicago Ornithological Society, Edward Warden, this hike will explore the many ecosystems of the Indiana Dunes including dunes, oak savannas, swamps, marshes, and forests.

We will meet in the outdoor courtyard in front of the 1155 building, located at 1155 E. 60th Street. Our bus will leave promptly at 10:00am, so be sure to be on time!

Participants are expected to wear appropriate clothing for hiking outdoors, preferably long pants and close-toed shoes. Please bring a water bottle and preferred snacks, granola bars and other light refreshments will be provided.

Please contact Tess Conway, student affairs administrator, at tconway@uchicago.edu with any questions.

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.

Expositions Magazine, CEGU’s student publication, is hosting a launch party to celebrate the release of our latest issue on Friday, May 12. Join us in the Urban Lounge to meet and hear from the talented students who contributed to Issue No. 4! If Chicago bike lane inequities, the daily lives of Las Vegans, or the hidden spaces of Hyde Park sound intriguing to you, come join us.

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.

Geoscientists now routinely examine the movement of continental blocks over deep time to glean information about the possible location of valuable resources. This practice was initially developed and perfected in the nineteenth century through engagements with fossil deposits – coal, gas, and petroleum reserves – and scaled up to global proportions by surveyors working in the southern hemisphere. In this period geologists identified conformities that link fossil fuels in the Paraná basin in Brazil to the Bowen basin of Queensland, through the Karoo basin of South Africa and the original Gondwana coal measures of India. Defined by the distinguishable Glossopteris fossil leaf, southern coal deposits are an energy network in deep time, latterly reinvented as a resource for imperialism, colonialism, and modernization from the nineteenth century.

This paper examines how these resources were conceived during this initial moment of reinvention and begins to map the uses to which they were put. Starting in the late nineteenth century, when colonial geological surveys first began to quantify the extent and value of these southern hemisphere coal basins, the paper explores the interests that surveyors and geologists pursued in the strata and the cultures of exploitation and extraction that developed in the wake of their study. Geologists in India, Australia, Southern Africa, and South America all worked intimately with related carboniferous stratigraphies. By the early twentieth century geologists had concluded, in the terms of Lewis Leigh Fermor (1880-1954), that the key difference between south and north was the considerable fossil energy wealth that the former presented to the latter. These geologists and their patrons in government and business therefore framed the remnants of the supercontinent of Gondwanaland as a vast energy source for various imperial projects.

During the late nineteenth century the resources of the former supercontinent energized imaginations but in the twentieth century they began to support economies. At least in its Permian permutations, ‘Gondwanaland’ came to be associated with coal, and therefore to modernity, wealth production, energy transitions, and to a modern geological south. According to a recent BP report, southern hemisphere deposits still make up about 24.4% of known reserves of high-grade anthracite. In India the Gondwana coalfields make up about 98% of remaining coal reserves. These deposits have been highly significant to industrial and economic development across the global south. By elaborating on this modern history, this paper challenges a (north) Atlantic-oriented history of fossil-fueled industrialization. An antipodean focus on Gondwanaland helps us consider the place of southern sources of fossil energy in nineteenth and twentieth-century growth trends. This offers up the possibility of a new history of fossil energy, coal, and global capitalism rooted firmly in southern geographies, temporalities, and political economies.

Jarrod Hore is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Sydney and Co-Director of the New Earth Histories Research Group. He is a historian of environments, geologies, and photographies and the author of Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism (University of California Press, 2022). His current project investigates the underpinnings of modern earth science in a series of geological surveys in late nineteenth century India, Australia, South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina.

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.

As of Autumn 2023, the Major and Minor in Environmental and Urban Studies will become the Major and Minor in Environment, Geography and Urbanization. We invite all interested students to join us for an information session on these updated program requirements, including the opportunity for Q&A. Lunch will be provided!

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

This event is open to all UChicago undergraduates. Third- and Fourth-Year ENST majors are encouraged to attend.

Join CEGU research mentors and fellow students to brainstorm together about the BA Thesis in the Environmental and Urban Studies major.

This event is optional (but encouraged) for Third-Year ENST majors.

Join EPIC, CEGU, and UChicago Career Advancement for the annual Energize event to network with professionals from across the sustainability, environmental, and energy fields. You will be able to meet with experienced professionals from organizations and companies such as the Invenergy, Green City Market, Shedd Aquarium, the Delta Institute, and more. Students will speak to panelists in small groups about their career experiences and how to succeed in various fields.

If you have any questions about access or to request any reasonable accommodations that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer or Career Advancement at careeradvancement@uchicago.edu.↗

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.

Join CEGU staff and fellow students to learn about the newly revised BA Thesis and BA Capstone process in the Environmental and Urban Studies major. Lunch will be provided.

This event is required for Third-Year ENST majors.

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.

This event is open to all UChicago undergraduates. Third- and Fourth-Year ENST majors are encouraged to attend.

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.

The recently-announced Our Roots Chicago plan from Mayor Lori Lightfoot in Chicago, intended to plant an additional 75 thousand trees in ‘vulnerable’ neighborhoods, was met with surprise controversy when several community organizations protested what they deemed to be the potential for environmental gentrification. Troubling the notion of trees as ‘ahistorical’ or ‘apolitical,’ this paper examines how Chicago residents, in pointing to the ways in which the planting of new trees may not be truly sustainable for their communities, reveal deeper connections between the processes of sustainable development and regimes of racial hierarchy in America’s cities. Expanding on Brandi Summers’ work on “Black aesthetic emplacement,” this paper examines how debates around sustainability become the place of contestation over the modern city, wherein urban policymakers turn to a ‘green aesthetic,’ concealing larger histories of environmental injustice, attaching symbols of sustainability to spatialized forms, and greening the image of the neighborhood—making it more appealing to private investment—rather than greening the neighborhood itself.

Nina Olney is an Instructional Assistant in the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU) and a recent graduate of the MAPSS program concentrating in Anthropology. Her research examines green gentrification in Chicago, specifically analyzing the role of street tree planning in transforming neighborhoods in terms of aesthetics, vulnerability, and access. Drawing on theories of racial capitalism, political ecology, and critical geography, her work centers the unseen elements of urban environments to trace a larger history of nature as property.

Join Research Mentor Kristi Del Vecchio for a 60-minute workshop on the IRB (Institutional Review Board) application process. This session is especially relevant for ENST thesis writers who intend to conduct research with human subjects (e.g. surveys, interviews, participant observation, etc.). The main goal of the workshop is to review the procedures and requirements for the IRB application in order to help students prepare for this process.

This event is open to all current UChicago undergraduates. Snacks will be provided.

Join Research Mentor Kristi del Vecchio and fellow thesis writers for an informal discussion on undergraduate research in Environmental and Urban Studies. Light refreshments will be served, and students will have an opportunity to share ideas and receive feedback on their projects.

This event is for third- and fourth-year ENST majors.

Join CEGU Research Mentor Kristi Del Vecchio for an interactive session on qualitative methods in environmental studies research. Her dissertation focuses on “eco-reproductive ethics," interrogating the ways in which environmental concerns (such as climate change and biodiversity loss) are impacting reproductive choices and kinship practices in the U.S. In this session, Kristi will summarize her process for data collection and analysis, and discuss some of the literature that informs her approach. This lunch-n-learn is especially relevant for students who are interested in qualitative methods in their current or future research.

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