CEGU

Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization

Division of Social Sciences, The University of Chicago

poster for Friends in High Places, October 2023 CEGU Event with Megan Black and Elizabeth Chatterjee

CEGU Event

Megan Black, MIT

Elizabeth Chatterjee, University of Chicago (discussant)

Friday, October 27, 2023
12:00–1:30pm CT
Room 142, 1155 E. 60th St.

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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.

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

Student Event

CEGU Open House

Wednesday, October 25, 2023
4:00–5:00pm CT

Urban Lounge, 1155 E. 60th St.

Chicago Riverwalk

Student Event

Friday, October 13, 2023
12:30–4:00pm CT

Meet in the North Courtyard at 1155 E. 60th St.

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Chicago exists because of the Chicago River, a shallow, meandering, and narrow channel that connects the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. Learn some of the history, significance, policy, and present-day challenges surrounding the River while walking downtown's beautiful Riverwalk with CEGU's Sabina Shaikh, UChicago Sustainability's Maureen McMahon (formerly with the City of Chicago's Office of the Mayor), Chicago Studies' Chris Skrable, and representatives from Ross-Barney, one of the architectural firms that designed and implemented the Riverwalk for the city.

Participants coming from the UChicago campus can meet a shuttle bus at 12:30pm in front of 1155 E. 60th Street (Chicago Studies'/CEGU's offices) for transit to the hike's starting spot. Participants meeting downtown should gather at Wolf Point, the westernmost entrance of the Riverwalk where the branches split, located at the intersection of Wacker and Lake Streets. Our hike will begin at the river level (downstairs) where the elevater opens at river level. The Riverwalk is fully accessible -- elevator available at the Lake/Wacker entrance.

If you require accommodation to participate in this hike, please contact chicagostudies@uchicago.edu. This event is co-sponsored by Chicago Studies.

Poster for Sarah Newman book launch event on October 11, 2023

Co-sponsored Event

Sarah Newman, Claudia Brittenham, Pauline Goul, and Mariana Petry Cabral

Wednesday, October 11, 2023
5:00pm CT
Assembly Hall, International House (1414 E. 59th St.)

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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.

photo of the lakefront at the Indiana Dunes; tall grass in the foreground, water in the background

Student Event

Wednesday, October 11, 2023
1:00–3:00pm CT

Social Sciences Quad

photo of the lakefront at the Indiana Dunes; tall grass in the foreground, water in the background

Student Event

Friday, September 29, 2023
10:00am–2:00pm CT

Meet in the North Courtyard at 1155 E. 60th St.

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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.

September 28, 2023 CEGU Colloquium Poster

CEGU Colloquium

Yiyun Peng, Postdoctoral Fellow in History

Thursday, September 28, 2023
4:00pm CT

John Hope Franklin Room, SSRB
(Room 224, 1126 E. 59th St.)

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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.

Student Event

Academic Opportunities Fair

Wednesday, September 27, 2023
3:30–6:30pm CT

Main Quad

EVENTS: 2022–23

Student Event

BA Thesis and Capstone Symposium

Tuesday, May 23, 2023
9:00am–4:30pm CT

Room 142, 1155 E. 60th St

poster for Scarcity, CEGU Book talk by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind, May 18, 2023

CEGU Event

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, The University of Chicago
Carl Wennerlind, Barnard College

Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago (moderator)

Thursday, May 18, 2023
5:00pm-6:30pm CT
John Hope Franklin Room, Social Sciences Research Building 224

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"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).

poster for May 2023 conference, New Directions in Amazonian Studies

Co-sponsored Event

Organized by Victoria Saramago and Eduardo Leão

May 17–18, 2023
Franke Institute for the Humanities, Regenstein Library (1100 E. 57th St.)

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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.

Cover of Expositions Magazine, Issue #4, showing a low-angle photo of cabbages in the foreground with a house and blue cloudy sky in the background

Student Event

Expositions Magazine: Issue No. 4 Launch Party

Friday, May 12, 2023
4:30–5:45pm CT

Urban Lounge, 1155 E. 60th St

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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.

Poster for May 10th CEGU Student Event, Grassroots Organizing Between Housing and Environmental Justice.

Student Event

Grassroots Organizing between Housing and Environmental Justice

Antonio Gutierrez, Autonomous Tenants Union

Wednesday, May 10, 2023
1:30–2:30pm CT

Urban Lounge, 1155 E. 60th St

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Please join CEGU for a collective discussion with representative(s) from the Autonomous Tenants Union (ATU) in regards to housing justice in Chicago and its connection to the environmental justice efforts in the city and beyond. We will look at the intersection of these two social justice movements, current impacts to tenants, and we will learn about ATU's structure and organizing model.

5/9 CEGU Event Poster Eleana Kim

Book Event

Eleana Kim, University of California, Irvine

Michael Fisch, University of Chicago (interlocutor)

Tuesday, May 9, 2023
4:00pm CT
Room 142, 1155 E. 60th St.

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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.

poster for Spring 2023 Weissbourd Conference, Ethics and Nature in a Time of Crisis

Co-sponsored Event

2023 Annual Weissbourd Conference

Friday, May 5, 2023
9:30am–5:15pm
Third Floor Lecture Hall, Swift Hall (1025 E. 58th St.)

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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.

poster for Spring 2023 Kristin Ross event, "Uprisings of the Earth"

CEGU Book Event

Kristin Ross

Thursday, May 4, 2023
5:00pm–6:30pm CT
Room 344, 1155 E. 60th St.

CEGU Book Event

Michael Kimmelman, New York Times

Evan Carver, University of Chicago (interlocutor)

Tuesday, May 2, 2023
6:00pm-7:00pm CT
Seminary Co-op Bookstore (5751 S. Woodlawn Ave.)

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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.

Frizzell Learning & Speaker Series

Michael Kimmelman, New York Times

Nootan Bharani, University of Chicago, Arts + Public Life (interlocutor)

Monday, May 1, 2023
4:30pm-6:00pm CT
The Theatre, Ida Noyes Hall (1212 E. 59th St., Third Floor)

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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.

Inaugural CEGU Conference

Calvin & Freda Redekop Lectures in Environment and Society
Farhana Sultana and Holly Jean Buck

Panels Featuring
Max Ajl, Hillary Angelo, Helen Anne Curry, Billy Fleming, Vinay Gidwani, Pauline Goul, Jo Guldi, Ihnji Jon, Josh Lepawsky, Shannon Mattern, Ivette Perfecto, and Xiaowei R. Wang

Moderated by CEGU Faculty
Alexander Arroyo, Grga Bašić, Neil Brenner, Elizabeth Chatterjee, Gary Herrigel, Catherine Kearns, and Sabina Shaikh

April 20–21, 2023
Room 122, Regenstein Library (1100 E. 57th St.)

Student Event

Third-year BA Thesis Workshop with CEGU Research Mentors

Wednesday, April 19, 2023
5:00pm CT

Room 129, 1155 E. 60th St

4/14: Jarrod Hore at the Environmental Studies Workshop (poster)

Environmental Studies Workshop

Carboniferous Imaginaries in the South: Colonial Surveying and the Fate of Fossil Energy

Jarrod Hore, University of New South Wales

Friday, April 14, 2023
12:00pm CT

Room 103, Wieboldt Hall
1050 E. 59th St.

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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.

poster for Science & Liberalism, April 2023 conference co-sponsored by CEGU
poster for Science & Liberalism, April 2023 conference co-sponsored by CEGU

Co-sponsored Conference

Keynotes
Peter Galison, Sophia Rosenfeld, Jules Gill-Peterson, and Myrna Perez Sheldon

Speakers
Ken Alder, Nima Bassiri, Etienne Benson, Meghna Chaudhuri, Terence Keel, Adam Leeds, Mary Mitchell, Amy E. Slaton, Jessica Wang, and Julie White

Organizers
Isabel Gabel, Stephanie Dick, and Marc Aidinoff

April 7–8, 2023

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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.

poster for CEGU Information Session, March 2023

Student Event

Friday, March 31, 2023
12:00pm-1:00pm
Urban Lounge, 1155 E. 60th St.

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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!

Student Event

BA Capstone Production Workshop

Wednesday, March 29, 2023
5:00–6:00pm
Urban Lounge, 1155 E. 60th St.

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ENST students on the Capstone track are invited to join us for a workshop to discuss tools and techniques for audiovisual production. Light snacks will be provided.
poster for February 2023 New Book Salon with Nancy Fraser, co-organized with 3CT
poster for February 2023 New Book Salon with Nancy Fraser, co-organized with 3CT

Co-sponsored Event

Arnaud Orain, Université Paris 8

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, University of Chicago (commentary)

Wednesday, March 1, 2023
5:00pm CT
Classics 110, 1010 E. 59th St.

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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

Student Event

BA Thesis Chat and Alumni Panel

Friday, February 24, 2023
12:30–1:30pm CT
Room 129, 1155 E. 60th St.

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Join CEGU staff, ENST alumni, and fellow thesis writers for an informal discussion on undergraduate research in the Environmental and Urban Studies major. Light refreshments will be served, and students will have an opportunity to share ideas and receive feedback on their projects.

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

Student Event

BA Thesis Brainstorm Session with CEGU Research Mentors

Wednesday, February 15, 2023
12:00pm CT
Room 129, 1155 E. 60th St.

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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.

ENERGIZE Career Event graphic, February 13, 2023

Student Event

Monday, February 13, 2023
6:00pm CT
Cloister Club, Ida Noyes Hall (1212 E. 59th St.)

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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.↗

CEGU Event

Nancy Fraser, The New School
Jason W. Moore, Binghamton University

Aaron Jakes, University of Chicago (moderator)

Friday, February 10, 2023
12:00pm CT
Room 142, 1155 E. 60th St.

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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.

3CT New Book Salon

Nancy Fraser, The New School

Ryan Cecil Jobson, University of Chicago (interlocutor)
Lisa Wedeen, University of Chicago (moderator)

Thursday, February 9, 2023
6:00pm CT
Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 5751 S. Woodlawn Ave.

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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.

Student Event

BA Thesis and Capstone Project Information Session

Wednesday, February 8, 2023
12:00pm CT
Math Lounge (first floor), 1155 E. 60th St.
& Zoom (hybrid event)

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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.

poster for 2/7 Economic History Seminar: Imperialism, with and without Cheap Nature

Economic History Seminar

Jason W. Moore, Binghamton University

Tuesday, February 7, 2023
5:00–6:00pm CT
SSRB Tea Room, 1126 E. 59th St. (2nd floor)

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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.

CEGU Book Event

Manuel P. Teodoro, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Sabina Shaikh, University of Chicago (interlocutor)

Thursday, February 2, 2023
6:00pm CT
Seminary Co-op Bookstore (5751 S. Woodlawn Ave.)

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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.

Student Event

BA Thesis Chat

Wednesday, January 18, 2023
3:30–5:00pm CT
Room 129, 1155 E. 60th St.

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Join CEGU staff 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 open to all UChicago undergraduates. Third- and Fourth-Year ENST majors are encouraged to attend.

Cover of Expositions Magazine Issue #3, showing an overhead view of a crowd on a brick paved area
Cover of Expositions Magazine Issue #3, showing an overhead view of a crowd on a brick paved area

Student Event

Expositions Launch Party

Friday, January 13, 2023
4:30pm CT
Urban Lounge, 1155 E. 60th St.

CEGU Event

Jeff Hou, University of Washington
Stephanie Wakefield, Life University

Evan Carver, University of Chicago (moderator)

Thursday, January 12, 2023
5:00–6:30pm CT
Room 142, 1155 E. 60th St.

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In this CEGU panel, two eminent urban thinkers reflect critically on the prospects for radical, emergent, grassroots design interventions to create more democratic, socially just and environmentally viable urban landscapes and forms of urbanization.
Poster for Energy Histories and Geographies CEGU Event, February 2022

Environmental Studies Workshop

Did the Earth Move for You? Human Geological Agency and the Koyna Earthquake of 1967

Sachaet Pandey, University of Chicago
Elizabeth Chatterjee, University of Chicago

Friday, December 2, 2022
12:00pm CT
SSRB Tea Room (1126 E. 59th St.)

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On December 11, 1967, a devastating earthquake flattened the little town of Koynanagar in Maharashtra, western India. Fingers immediately pointed at the nearby Koyna hydroelectric dam, one of India's largest even today. Prompting domestic and international inquests, the Koyna earthquake became perhaps the world’s most famous and widely attested case of reservoir-induced seismicity. As postcolonial energy projects reached newly massive scales, humans appeared to be influencing the deep Earth itself. This paper uses the history of the Koyna Dam to explore transforming understandings of human geological agency and the ecological ramifications of economic development. Through the dam, energy infrastructures appeared to connect directly to deep history and the deep Earth, presaging debates over the Anthropocene and human powers to both generate and master natural hazards at a newly planetary scale.

Environmental Studies Workshop

Bathsheba Demuth, Brown University
Matthew Johnson, Harvard University
Owain Lawson, University of Toronto
Jen Rose Smith, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Alexander Arroyo, University of Chicago (moderator)
Elizabeth Chatterjee, University of Chicago (moderator)

Friday, November 18, 2022
12:00pm CT
Harper 104 (1116 E. 59th St.)

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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.

Poster for Energy Histories and Geographies CEGU Event, February 2022

CEGU Event

Chandana Anusha, Northwestern University
Rachel Gittman, East Carolina University
Liz Koslov, UCLA

Michael Fisch, University of Chicago (moderator)

Thursday, November 17, 2022
4:30–6:00pm CT
Classics 110 (1010 E. 59th St.) & Zoom Webinar

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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.

Student Event

BA Thesis Chat

Wednesday, November 9, 2022
12:00–1:30pm CT
Room 129, 1155 E. 60th St.

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Join Instructional Assistant Xixi Jiang 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.

Poster for Energy Histories and Geographies CEGU Event, February 2022

Environmental Studies Workshop

Green Places, Green Aesthetics: (Re)producing Vulnerability and the Spatial Politics of Street Tree Planning in Chicago

Nina Olney, University of Chicago

Friday, November 4, 2022
12:00pm CT
SSRB Tea Room (1126 E. 59th St.)

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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.

Student Event

Architectural Studies Open Studio: Built Environment Open House

Wednesday, November 2, 2022
5:00–8:00pm CT
MADD Center, Crerar Library

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Meet faculty and course instructors who teach about the built environment from across the curriculum, and learn about upcoming classes in which you can enroll for Winter/Spring.

Open Studio is un-programmed time for students interested in architecture/urban design and related disciplines to meet one another, work together on projects, share ideas and techniques, and build community. While the space is designed mostly for students enrolled in, or interested in, architecture studio classes, all are welcome, and no registration is required. You're welcome just to drop in, or to stay for longer. Food will be served, and some Wednesdays will feature optional workshops/events alongside the free space to work. 

 

Student Event

IRB Workshop

Wednesday, October 26, 2022
5:00–6:00pm CT
Room 129, 1155 E. 60th St.

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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.

Student Event

BA Thesis Chat

Friday, October 21, 2022
1:30–2:30pm CT
Room 129, 1155 E. 60th St.

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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.

Student Event

Lunch Workshop on Qualitative Methods: Examples from Research on "Eco-Reproductive Ethics"

Kristi Del Vecchio

Friday, October 21, 2022
12:00–1:00pm CT
Room 129, 1155 E. 60th St.

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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.

CEGU Event

A Roundtable with CEGU Faculty:

Alexander Arroyo
Sarah Fredericks
Amir Jina
Sarah Newman
Jennifer Scappettone

Sabina Shaikh (moderator)

Thursday, October 20, 2022
4:30–4:45pm CT—Welcome Reception
4:45–6:30pm CT—Roundtable Event
SSRB Tea Room (1126 E. 59th St.) & Zoom Webinar

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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.

EVENTS: 2021–22

CEGU Event

Animals, Territories, Environments

Matthew Gandy, University of Cambridge
Mindi Schneider, Wageningen University
Neil Brenner, University of Chicago (moderator)
Victoria Saramago, University of Chicago (moderator)

Friday, April 29, 2022, 12:30–2:00pm CT
Zoom

CEGU Event

Environment, Democracy, & Social Movements

Alyssa Battistoni, Barnard College
Megan Black, MIT
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, University of Chicago (moderator)
Lisa Wedeen, University of Chicago (moderator)

Thursday, April 21, 2022, 4:30–6:00pm CT
Zoom

Poster for Energy Histories and Geographies CEGU Event, February 2022
Poster for Energy Histories and Geographies CEGU Event, February 2022
Co-sponsored Event

Lenticular Ontologies

Ghassan Hage, University of Melbourne

Wednesday, March 30, 2022, 5:00pm CT
SSRB Tea Room, 1126 E. 59th St. & Zoom (Hybrid Event)

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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 NationAgainst Paranoid NationalismAfter-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 

Co-sponsored Event

Property, Personhood, & Police: Racial Banishment in Postcolonial Los Angeles

Ananya Roy, UCLA

Thursday, March 3, 2022, 5:00–6:00pm CT
Zoom

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

Poster for Energy Histories and Geographies CEGU Event, February 2022

Co-sponsored Event

No Empires, No Dust Bowls: Lessons from the First Global Environmental Crisis

Hannah Holleman, Amherst College

Wednesday, March 2, 2022, 12:30–1:50pm CT
Zoom

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

CEGU Event

Energy Histories & Geographies

Thea Riofrancos, Providence College
Julie Klinger, University of Delaware
Ryan Cecil Jobson, University of Chicago (moderator)

Thursday, February 24, 2022, 4:30–6:00pm CT
Zoom

CEGU Event

Climate & the Legacies of Empire

Sunil Amrith, Yale University
Keston Perry, Williams College
Elizabeth Chatterjee, University of Chicago (moderator)

Thursday, February 10, 2022, 4:30–6:00pm CT
Zoom