Heather Davis to Kick Off New Climate Justice Speaker Series
Anna Mitchell ’22
Davis’ book Plastic Matter is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
Photo credit: “Plastic Meteorite”, Perdita Phillips, 2013, via Heather Davis.
What is the anthropocene? How can art and the study of art engage with ideas of climate justice? Dr. Heather Davis –– artist, scholar, and co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies –– will speak today, March 8, at Sarah Lawrence in a public event to kick off a new faculty-led initiative in climate justice.
Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, Davis will speak on her current project, Plastic Matter –– forthcoming from Duke University Press –– to address issues of matter, materiality, waste, community, and resilience.
A group of SLC professors incubated the series, new this semester, as part of their emerging course cluster in climate justice. Sensitive to students’ increasing interest in the climate crisis and the need for conversations on the topic, , faculty say the cluster provides, above all, a forum for talk, work and thought.
Davis will be the first in a series of speakers visiting Sarah Lawrence through the new Climate Justice course cluster. The course cluster, intentionally amorphous, expresses a cross-disciplinary desire and sense of responsibility to engage with questions of human-induced climate change and environmental justice, including study of race, gender, class and other identities on a planet convulsed by irreversible and diverse changes.
Sarah Hamill (Art History), Eric Leveau (Literature, French), Bernice Rosenzweig (Environmental Science), Michelle Hersh (Biology) and Charles Zerner (Environmental Studies) are offering courses this semester in the cluster mode, with titles such as “Art & Ecology,” “Studies in Ecocriticism: The Idea of Nature in the Western Tradition,” and “Giving, Taking, and Cheating: The Ecology of Symbiosis”.
“We aim to understand the science of climate change and its impacts on organisms and ecosystems; analyze the social and economic forces contributing to climate injustice; and deconstruct some of the artistic and literary representations of nature that are at the core of the patriarchal and colonialist model of the West,” they wrote in a statement available to students.
They also wrote that they hope this format will give students “the opportunity to engage in shared dialogue,” encouraging the possibility of collaborative conference work, cross-course small-group work and more.
Yet interest in the project –– which also involves the speaker series and a newsletter and will culminate in a symposium of student work across disciplines –– continues to grow. Since the effort was announced in late January, faculty in geography, writing, biology, the visual arts and other disciplines have joined in, among them writing faculty Marie Howe and Kate Zambreno.
The speaker series –– delivered via Zoom –– is public and intended to promote dialogue among students and the broader community.
The book Art in the Anthropocene is available online as a free PDF via the Open Humanities Press.