Pitt students and faculty are cordially invited to attend this year's CLST Distinguished Lecture Series, hosted by Common Seminar Instructor Ruth Mostern, Associate Professor of History and Director of the World History Center.
2019 ANNUAL CLST DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES
A SENSE OF PLACE IN AN EPOCH OF LOSS
The ethical, epistemological, and artistic challenges of doing theory and history in times of profound global loss is the key problematic addressed in this lecture series. The overall aim is to develop languages and frameworks for communicating about the Anthropocene as an epoch of loss. At present, discussion about the catastrophic and rapid changes now underway in the earth system—transformations that include the mass extinction of species, the inundation of cities, and the collapse of entire ecosystems—focuses largely upon concepts like sustainability, mitigation, and resilience. However, irrevocable loss has already begun, and it will accelerate even under the most optimistic scenarios for human ingenuity and investment. We need new modalities of thinking about loss and commemoration. To an extent that is rare in academia, the issues are largely uncharted. The questions are existential and profound. They include: What are the limits of hopefulness? Is it morally appropriate to pause for elegy when there is so much to be done? Is it morally defensible not to do so? What can we learn from historical cases of civilizational collapse? Does speculative fiction help us envision what may be coming? How can we take stock of what exactly it is that we are losing?
This year’s Distinguished Lecturers collectively will explore these questions in part by theorizing the concept of place, the lens through which humans name and make meaning about the world. People name the locations of homes, from which some of us may be displaced forever. Place is a key concept for non-human species as well. Fish return to ancestral spawning grounds, and when they are blocked by dams, entire populations are destroyed. The lecturers will invite us to contemplate how to use place as a way to understand the scope and impact of loss, and how to use place as a focus for remembrance.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
April 10 Introductory Plenary Lecture
1:00-2:15 PM, Reception 12:30, Room 602-CL
Intensionality and Loss in the Red River Basin of the North
Stephanie C. Kane, Professor of Global and International Studies, Indiana University
Kane’s ethnography approaches the architecture of Canadian Human Rights from the outside in, where geoscience and a First Nation ritual for Missing and Murdered Girls and Women channel water’s symbolic and material powers.
Dr. Kane specializes in the political ecology of water. She is author of Where Rivers Meet the Sea (2012), AIDS Alibis (1998), and The Phantom Gringo Boat (1994), and co-author of Crime’s Power (2003).
_____________________________________________________________________________________
April 17 Midconference Plenary Lecture
1:00-2:15 PM, Reception 12:30, Room 602-CL
Islands of Lost Plastic: Challenging the Material Politics of Anthropocene Frontiers
Kim De Wolff, Assistant Professor of Environmental Philosophy, University of North Texas
Description:
In middle of the North Pacific Ocean plastic waste concentrates into ‘garbage patches’ rumored to be islands so solid you can walk on them. This talk explores the Anthropocene seascape as it is transformed by both synthetic products escaping human intentions and by assumptions about how to respond. Combining ethnographic field work with media analysis, I argue that dominant approaches for addressing ocean pollution perpetuate powerful frontier narratives that shape flows of waste and water into seemingly inevitable, even inhabitable terrestrial forms.
Dr. De Wolff’s research connects global ecological crises to cultures of consumption and waste . She is completing a book, Plastic Currents, on the great Pacific garbage patch.
____________________________________________________________________________________
April 18 Concluding Plenary Lecture
5:30-7:00 PM, Reception 5:00, Room G8-CL
Once Upon An Indigenous T.I.M.E.-S.P.A.C.E.: Hope’s Place in an Epoch of Loss and Epic Loss
James Rock, Director, Planetarium Program, University of Minnesota Duluth
Description:
TIME-SPACE refers to Turtle Island/Mother Earth: Stop Pretending And Change Everything… As Everything Changes…SPACE/AEC.
In spite of experiencing genocidal and biocidal loss of our relatives on Turtle Island(N.,C.&S.America), Indigenous people and millennia-old stories, values and wisdom have always had much to offer the new, settler-colonial "relatives" who mostly refused to S.P.A.C.E. on T.I.M.E. centuries ago in time for this consequential now that we are all experiencing. To maintain balance, Indigenous wisdom says Big Mom (T.I.M.E.) has previously shaken us off her Turtle Shell. How then are we still here repeating the story…and still bargaining in denial for the last time? Hope’s place can only come after changing the denial and acting together in the Circle. So SPACE all upon & around TIME.
Dr. Rock’s research efforts have been in the areas of ethno-astronomy and archeoastronomy. He co-authored The Dakota/Lakota Star Map Constellation Guidebook: An Introduction to D(L)akota Star Knowledge (2014).
