Environmental Emergencies, Emergent Environments
Critical Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Inaugural Conference, Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU)
Division of Social Sciences, The University of Chicago
April 20–21, 2023
Environmental Emergencies,
Emergent Environments
Critical Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Inaugural Conference, Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU)
Division of Social Sciences, The University of Chicago
April 20–21, 2023
Emergent Environments of Urbanization
Moderated by Neil Brenner, University of Chicago
Friday, April 21, 2023, 1:30–3:00pm
Room 122, Regenstein Library
Struggles to reshape cities are inextricably intermeshed with the making and remaking of socio-environmental relations both within and beyond centers of human settlement. This panel explores such struggles in relation to environmental justice, energy transitions, democracy, and spatial politics. By exploring the conflictual dynamics of urban environmental transformation in several contemporary sites and territories, we explore questions of conceptualization as well as transformative practice in a world of intensifying socio-environmental turbulence.
Bubble Clash: Seagulls, Waste, and the Challenges of Environmental Justice in a Multicultural Suburb
Ihnji Jon, Cardiff University
Ihnji Jon is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, where she explores how to link political ecology and environment planning with feminist relational approaches to identity, politics, and space. She completed her interdisciplinary PhD at the University of Washington (Seattle), and master's degree at Sciences Po Paris. Previously she was a Chateaubriand Fellow at École Normale Supérieure (Paris Ulm), and a Lecturer in International Urban Politics at Melbourne School of Design. Currently, she is writing about radical politics of philosophical pragmatism, as it relates to deconstructing the process of green gentrification as a contested site of plural value logics and ontologies.
Public Lands and the Energy Transition: Urbanization, Energy Democracy, and Spatial Politics
Hillary Angelo, UC Santa Cruz
Hillary Angelo is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and current Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her work offers a social-theoretical perspective on socio-ecological questions through historical and contemporary research on urban greening, sustainability planning and policy, infrastructure, and climate change. She has published widely in leading scholarly and public venues including Nature, The Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Theory and Society, and Harper’s Magazine, and her first book, How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens, was published in 2021 by the University of Chicago Press. She is currently writing a book on public lands and the energy transition, which treats America’s public lands as a key site to ask and answer questions about climate crisis, social crisis, and paths of social change in the 21st century.
Building Just, Post-Carbon Futures
Billy Fleming, University of Pennsylvania
Billy Fleming is the founding Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design. He is a co-founder of the Climate + Community Project—a climate justice think tank dedicated to connecting movement demands and progressive legislators through applied research—and co-creator of the organization Data Refuge—an international initiative to secure critical environmental data at risk of erasure during the Trump Administration. His work includes recent books A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation (Island Press, 2021) with Carolyn Kousky and Alan Berger and Design With Nature Now (Columbia University Press, 2019) with Frederick Steiner, Richard Weller, and Karen M’Closkey. Billy’s writing and scholarship have appeared in Dissent, Guardian, Washington Post, New York Times, Places Journal, and Journal of Architectural Education, among others. His current book project is titled Building Just, Post-Carbon Futures: Imagining and Implementing Climate Justice in America and is expected in 2024.