Spring 2016
Gender Matters: Feminist Ecologies and Materialisms (Website)
Every day plastic sludge flows into the North Pacific Gyre, extending the Great Pacific Garbage Patch into the digestive systems of fish on up the food chain. As we mark the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, coastal erosion accelerates, bringing New Orleans closer to the sea and deepening the city's social and cultural fault lines. Global warfare, even after the bombs are dropped, persists in toxic afterlives -- depleted uranium bullets, land mines, chemical run-off -- that leave their mark on both landscapes and bodies.
What is happening to 'nature,' not only as a material world but a symbolic concept, in these places where environmental destruction, economic exploitation, and political injustice converge? Where does the human begin or end, separated from non-human animals, organic material, and technological innovation? This year's GRID seminar, "Gender Matters: Feminist Ecologies and Materialities" begins from the idea that there is nothing especially new about these forms of ecological catastrophe as they unfold across various hierarchies of life, other than a widening scalar reach that now encroaches upon the walls of First-World privilege. We propose to think with and through the history of feminist, anti-racist, and social justice approaches as they have continually developed survival tactics in the face of planetary degradation and immiseration and generated new ways of making livable worlds.
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April 15 (Friday): "Animating Entanglements"
with Dana Luciano (Georgetown University) and Mel Chen (UC-Berkeley)
In this moment of ecological crisis, many are asking whether humanity has a future. "Animating Entanglements" launches the 2016 GRID seminar and speaker series by interrogating the premise of that question. How have political technologies of racialization and colonial fantasy both generated and taken shape through the imagined borders between the human and its others, like animals, plants, technology, rocks? And how do the local struggles and ecological alliances of those caught up in landscapes of exploitation and environmental destruction rework and reimagine those borders? Mel Chen and Dana Luciano will stage an encounter between these two registers of the human/inhuman: histories of violence and subjugation alongside an expansive openness to imagining the world otherwise.
April 30 (Saturday): "Archipelagic Entanglements"
with Vanessa Agard-Jones (Yale University), Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (George Mason University), Maile Arvin (UC-Riverside), Neel Ahuja (UNC), Jasbir Puar (Rutgers University), and Larisa Mann/DJ Ripley (Fordham)
+ 8PM Dance Party with DJ Ripley and Juliana Huxtable @ Sarner Underground
This event maps different entanglements of nature and culture that produce geographies of gender, sexuality, and race. With scholars focused on the Caribbean, Pacific Islands, Northeast Asia, and the Middle East, we will make archipelagic connections between bodies, landscapes and violence to push the limits of conventional frames like "the nation" or "the global."
May 9 (Monday): "Onto-Epistemological Entanglements"
with Deboleena Roy (Emory University), Banu Subramanian (UMass-Amherst), Neda Atanasoski (UC-Santa Cruz), Kalindi Vora (UC-San Diego), and Angie Willey (UMass-Amherst).
As the humanities and social sciences experiment more with the physical and natural sciences, the question of collaboration and translation is essential. "Onto-epistemological entanglements" confronts this challenge in two ways: first, scholars at the cutting edge of feminist science and technology studies (STS) will describe their research on biomedicine and emergent digital technology; second, by inviting two different pairs of writers who write collaboratively, we will also focus on the question of how collaboration and interdisciplinary thought might generate creative knowledge.
May 31-June 1 (Tue-Wed): "Institutional Entanglements"
with Marisol de la Cadena (UC Davis), Victoria Funari (Haverford), Karma Chávez (U Wisconsin-Madison), Lourdes Lujan (activist), Arielle Concilio (activist), Jillian Mayer (activist), and Marián Gutierrez (activist)
In "Institutional Entanglements," we orient this energy outwards, asking what it means to seize on these epistemological openings and collectively experiment with ways to follow them beyond institutional frameworks such as the university and NGOs. Our seminar has insisted on the importance of place, a sense that knowledge production is a process expressed through specific landscapes. This final collaborative event departs from a corollary insistence, that our onto-epistemological projects are not reducible, however, to a closed vision of this place or a self-evidently emancipatory landscape.
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Gender Matters will be directed by Prof Aimee Bahng (Dartmouth) in collaboration with GRID Postdoctoral Fellow Max Hantel.
WGST Associated Course
WGST 96: Advanced Research In Gender Studies
This course is WGST's curricular connection with the Gender Research Institute's annual spring research seminar. Each offering of WGST 96 will center on texts written or created by GRID's guest speakers and complemented with other relevant theoretical, critical, or artistic material. Students matriculated in WGST 96 will automatically be considered GRID Fellows and will have the opportunity of meeting and directly engaging in conversation with the authors and artists studied in the course. In addition to regular class sessions, students will also attend the GRID seminar meetings and public lectures. Students will be expected to produce a publishable paper on a topic of their choice as it relates to the theme of the seminar. Final projects may be co-authored with any GRID Fellow. Prerequisites: Major and Minors in WGST; or Permission by Instructor
In Spring 2016: "Gender Matters: Feminist Ecologies and Materialisms"
Plastic islands in the North Pacific; accelerating hurricane conditions around the post-Katrina Gulf Coast; the toxic afterlives of global warfare, from depleted uranium to land mines to chemical warfare. What is happening to 'nature,' not only as a material world but a symbolic concept, in these places where environmental destruction, economic exploitation, and political injustice converge? Where does the human begin or end, separated from non-human animals, organic material, and technological innovation? This course begins from the idea that there is nothing especially new about these forms of ecological catastrophe as they unfold across various hierarchies of life, other than a widening scalar reach that now encroaches upon the walls of First-World privilege. We will examine various methodologies for thinking with and through the history of feminist, anti-racist, and social justice approaches as they have continually developed survival tactics in the face of planetary degradation and immiseration and generated new ways of making livable worlds.
Dr. Hantel, GRID Postdoctoral Fellow