In this public session of the graduate seminar “Decolonial Futurities: Submerged Perspectives from and within the Americas,“ team-taught by Macarena Gómez-Barris and Leila Lehnen, participants will discuss with author Rita Indiana her novel Tentacle (And Other Stories, 2019), translated by Achy Obejas. The novel won the 2017 Grand Prize of the Association of Caribbean Writers. It is the first Spanish-language book to have won the prize.

Open to Brown University students, faculty, and staff. RSVP by September 23.

For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.

About the Author

Rita Indiana is a Dominican-born New York–based music composer, and a key figure in contemporary Latin American literature. She is the author of five novels and is a driving force in experimental Caribbean popular music. She writes about queer outsiders in possible and impossible worlds and teaches storytelling to people of all ages and backgrounds. She is a Global Distinguished Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University and the interim director of the MFA Creative Writing in Spanish Program.

Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of the Decolonial Futurities Speaker Series.

Please join us on Thursday, September 26 from 4:00-5:30 in the Conference Room of Meiklejohn House (159 George St.) for a talk by Lúcia Sá (University of Manchester), What the Waters and the Stones Say: Listening to the World in Brazilian Indigenous Literature and Art.

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION

In line with other recent Indigenous cultural production from Brazil. which emphasizes the importance on non-human subjects for the understanding of collectivity and ancestral belonging, this paper will focus on the role of rivers and stones in written and visual works by Ezequiel Vitor Tuxá and Gustavo Caboco.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Lúcia Sá is from São Paulo. She is professor of Brazilian Studies at University of Manchester, UK. She is the author of Rainforest Literatures: Amazonian Texts and Latin American Cultures (2004, Minnesota University Press), Life in the Megalopolis: Mexico City and São Paulo (Routledge, 2007), and many articles on Brazilian and Latin American literature, cinema, and visual arts. She was principal researcher on the Arts and Humanities Research Network “Racism and anti-racism in Brazil: the case of Indigenous peoples,” and led the Brazil strand of the project Cultures of Anti-Racism in Brazil: the case of Indigenous Peoples, also funded by the AHRC.

A reading by Natalie Diaz followed by a conversation between the author and Brown University professor Macarena Gómez-Barris.

About the Speakers

Natalie Diaz is the author of two poetry collections, Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf, 2020), winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, and When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). She has received many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Mellon Fellowship, and a USA Fellowship. She was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. She is currently the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, where she directs the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is the Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and the director of the Center for Environmental Humanities at the Cogut Institute. She is author of At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press, forthcoming), Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (University of California Press, 2018), The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017), and Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (University of California Press, 2009). She also co-edited Towards a Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) with Herman Gray. She is series editor of Dissident Acts at Duke University Press with Diana Taylor.

This event was a part of the Greg and Julie Flynn Cogut Institute Speaker Series, which brings high-profile speakers in the humanities to the Brown University campus. Each visit includes a public lecture and a separate seminar-style meeting with undergraduate students.

Three distnguished poets read from their work in and for the Providence community.

Julie Carr is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose, who has been a National Poetry Series selection and a National Endowment for the Arts fellow.

dg nanouk okpik is the American Book Award-winning and National Book Award-finalist author of Blood Snow and Corpse Whale.

Eleni Sikelnianos is the award-winning author of ten poetry collections, who teaches in the MFA program at Brown University.

This event is part of Ecopoetics, a series curated by Eleni Sikelianos and presented by Literary Arts in conjunction with the Center for Environmental Humanities and the Brown Arts Institute.

In this panel, Jen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu), Hi’ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kanaka Maoli), and Bathsheba Demuth (settler) discussed how the idea of “careful guessing” can contribute to our encounters and ways of thinking with the other-than-human world in the past and present. Looking at environments from Hawaii to Alaska to Antarctica, the discussion touched on new work in Native American and Indigenous Studies, the environmental humanities, and ways of narrating the world around us.

About the Speakers

Jen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu/Eyak) is Assistant Professor of Geography and American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. She works at the intersection of critical Indigenous studies, cultural human geography, and environmental humanities. Her book Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity is forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2025 and takes up Indigenous literature and theory on race, indigeneity, and anti-coloniality in polar spaces. She also serves on the advisory board for the Eyak Cultural Foundation, a non-profit that organizes annual language and cultural revitalization gatherings and directs a Cultural Mapping Project in their homelands of Eyak, Alaska.

Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kanaka Maoli) is Assistant Professor of Native and Indigenous Studies at Yale University. An interdisciplinary scholar, she researches and teaches on issues of settler colonialism, environment, and Indigenous sovereignty. Her first book, Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Duke University Press, 2022) is the recipient of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) Best First Book Award and the Scholars of Color First Book Award from Duke University Press. She currently serves as the co-chair of the Nominations Committee for NAISA. She also sits on the Editorial Boards of the NAIS, Food, Culture, and Society, and Critical Ethnic Studies journals.

Bathsheba Demuth is Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. She is an environmental historian specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interest in northern environments and cultures began when she was 18 and moved north of the Arctic Circle in the Yukon. For more than two years, she mushed huskies, hunted caribou, fished for salmon, tracked bears, and otherwise learned to survive in the taiga and tundra. In the years since, she has lived in and studied Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America. From the archive to the dog sled, she is interested in how the histories of people, ideas, places, and non-human species intersect.

Presented by the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown.

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, activist and filmmaker whose work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s, after the military coup against the president Salvador Allende. In London, she was a co-founder of Artists for Democracy in l974. She coined the term “Arte Precario” in the mid-1960s in Chile, as a new independent and non-colonized category for her precarious works composed of debris, structures that disappear in the landscape, which include her quipus (knot in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space. Vicuña has re-invented the ancient Pre-Columbian quipu system of non-writing with knots through ritual acts that weave the urban landscape, rivers and oceans, as well as people, to re-construct a sense of unity and awareness of interconnectivity. These works bridge art and poetry as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard.” 

This event is part of Ecopoetics, a series curated by Eleni Sikelianos and presented by Literary Arts in conjunction with the Center for Environmental Humanities and the Brown Arts Institute.

Rain location: McCormack Family Theater, Room 132, 70 Brown Street.

Phoebe Giannisi, one of the foremost contemporary Greek poets, is a professor at the Department of Architecture of the University of Thessaly. She is the author of eight books of poetry, two of which have appeared in English with New Directions Press, while a third, Homerica (World Poetry Books: 2017) was selected by Anne Carson as a Favorite Book of 2017. Her work in the field of Ecopoetics transverses the borders between various media, investigating the poetics of voice, body and place through writing, performances, video and sound-works, poetic installations.

This event is part of Ecopoetics, a series curated by Eleni Sikelianos and presented by Literary Arts in conjunction with Modern Greek Studies, the Center for Environmental Humanities and the Brown Arts Institute.

This conversation features Indigenous artists Olinda Yawar Tupinambá and Ziel Karapotó, who both exhibited work in the Brazil Pavilion of the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Leila Lehnen, Chair of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, and Jamille Pinheiro Dias, Fall 2024 Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, will moderate. The conversation emerges from the graduate collaborative humanities seminar “Decolonial Futurities,” led by Lehnen and Macarena Gómez-Barris, which explores artistic responses to legacies of (neo)colonialism, racial capitalism, and extractivist exploitation.

In Portuguese with English translation provided by headset.

Free and open the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.

About the Speakers

Olinda Yawar Tupinambá, who belongs to the Tupinambá and Pataxó Hãhãhãe peoples, is a multi-talented journalist, photographer, screenwriter, director, curator, performance artist, filmmaker, and environmental activist. Her work “Equilíbrio” [“Balance”] was showcased at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. She has curated several festivals and film exhibitions, including the Cine Kurumin Indigenous Film Festival, Mostra Lugar de Mulher é no Cinema, and the first Indigenous Film and Culture Festival — FeCCI 2022. She also produced two film exhibitions: Mostra Paraguaçu de Cinema Indígena and Amotara — Olhares das Mulheres Indígenas (2021). In 2015, she earned a degree in social communication with a specialization in journalism from Faculdades Integradas Ipitanga (FACIIP). Through her artistic endeavors, she challenges and dispels racialized and stereotypical perceptions of Indigenous peoples. Her work serves to amplify ancestral voices, condemning historical and contemporary anti-Indigenous violence while also asserting the significance of Indigenous territories, bodies, existences, and expressions, underscoring the enduring presence of Indigenous peoples across time. Her work emphasizes that Indigenous individuals, cultures, and knowledges are integral to the contemporary world, drawing from the Indigenous past to redefine and update narratives of Indigeneity.

Ziel Karapotó is a visual multimedia artist, filmmaker, actor, and cultural producer hailing from the Karapotó community of Terra Nova, São Sebastião in the Brazilian state of Alagoas and currently residing in the Indigenous territory of Marataro Kaetés, Igarassu in the state of Pernambuco. His work has garnered recognition on both national and international platforms. Notably, his artwork “Cardume II” (2024) was showcased at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. His short film “The verb became flesh” [“O verbo se fez carne”] (2019) received the prestigious “From Another Sky” [“De um outro céu”] prize in 2020. He has actively contributed to the research groups Ciência e Arte indígena no Nordeste [Indigenous Science and Art in the Northeast] (CAIN-UFPE) and Culturas de Antirracismo na América Latina [Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America] (CARLA-UFBA). Since 2021, he has served as the general coordinator of the Associação de Indígena em Contexto Urbano Karaxuwanassu [Association of Indigenous Peoples in Urban Contexts] (ASSICUKA). His artistic practice and knowledge-making are deeply rooted in the traditions of his ancestors, serving as a form of resistance and anticolonial strength, aligning with his belief in the enduring power of Indigenous art and science.

Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of the Decolonial Futurities Speaker Series, and the Brown Arts Institute as part of the IGNITE series, with the support of the Department of Modern Culture and Media, the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, and the Brazil Initiative at the Watson Institute.

Inspired by philosophical critiques of humanism and various ethnographies, archaeologists have deconstructed the notion of the universal human; they have also explored various conceptions of personhood, be it fractal, distributed, or other. And yet, this discussion remains mostly anthropocentric, undervalues the role of affectivity and sensoriality, and is philosophically rooted in the European tradition. In addition, the personhood of the archaeologist themselves is rarely part of the discussion. 

What is the human that archaeologists envisage when they write about the pre-modern past? How does their own conception and materialization of the human, as a sensorial and embodied being, shape their narratives of personhood in the past? How can we imagine different conceptions of personhood, plant, animal, thing, other, beyond the human? How does the affective and sensorial, mutual constitution of humans and landscapes produce notions of personhood? How does the performative constitution of the body, through dress, tattooing and bodily modification, gestures, and postures, produce certain notions of personhood?

These are some of the questions which will be explored in this conference by revisiting notions of the human and of the person while also exploring some of the fascinating archaeological material from the prehistoric Mediterranean. Participants will engage with writings and bodies of thinking from many different intellectual and social contexts, including those beyond the Mediterranean, and drawing inspiration from frameworks developed in both Global North and South, defined relationally rather than chronologically, including Indigenous Thinking and Black Theory. 

Free and open to the public. All are welcome.

Organized by: Yannis Hamilakis, Mina Nikolovieni, Ana González San Martín, and Yilmaz Yeniler (JIAAW)

Presented by the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, with additional support from the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown

What does the regreening of Antarctica mean for seemingly distant places like Mexico? Tania Ximena’s film La Marcha del Liquen [The Stride of Lichen] narrates the story of Antarctic glacier ice, its encounter with the sea, and the advance of lichen and moss. Meanwhile, on the Mexican coast, a community is forced to live only in memories.

This screening of the film was followed by a conversation between the director, Amanda Macedo Macedo (Ph.D. candidate in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, graduate fellow at the Cogut Institute), and Iván Ramos (assistant professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies).

About the Film

La Marcha del Liquen [The Stride of Lichen]

Mexico, 2024 | 29 min.

Written and directed by Tania Ximena

Voice: Esmeralda López Méndez | Portrait: Guadalupe Cobos | Cinematography: Tania Ximena (Isla Rey Jorge, Antarctica), Linda López H. Maldonado (Tabasco) | Editing and Post-production: Rogelio Díaz | Color and DCP: Omar Lara | VFX Tabasco: Rijl Habib | Direct Sound Recording: Tania Ximena (Isla Rey Jorge, Antarctica), Amanda Granda (Tabasco) | Music: Carlos Edelmiro | Sound Design and Mixing: Joel Argüelles | Local Production: Sister Ana Mayo, Sister María Esther Hernández | Production: Tania Ximena and ALJUIR Audiovisual | Language: Yokot’an and Spanish with English Subtitles

This film was made possible thanks to the Colombian Antarctic Program (PAC) of the Colombian Ocean Commission (CCO), the Uruguayan Antarctic Institute (IAU) and the Artigas Base on King George Island, Antarctica, the Colombian Art in Antarctica Project (PCAA), the System of Supports for Creation and Cultural Projects (SACPC), the FEMSA Biennial, the Jumex Contemporary Art Foundation, Sony Mexico, Phonolab, Disruptiva Films, and Sergei Saldivar.

About the Director

Tania Ximena (b. 1985, Mexico) is a visual artist and filmmaker whose work is rooted in extensive field research. She has showcased her art in major Mexican museums, including Ex Teresa Arte Actual, the Museo de Arte Moderno, the Museo Jumex, and the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil. Her work has also appeared in international exhibitions such as BIENALSUR (Argentina), the Orleans Architecture Biennale (France), and the Bienal Internacional de Arte SIART (Bolivia). In 2022, she became a fellow of Mexico’s National System of Art Creators. She has received the FONCA Young Creators grant three times and has been awarded the Mexican Cinema Promotion Grant from IMCINE on two occasions: one for script rewrites and another for production. Her debut feature film, Pobo ‘Tzu’ [White Night], won several awards, including the Grand Jury Prize Kaleidoscope at DOC NYC and the Critics Award at FICUNAM. She participated in the X Colombian Antarctic Expedition, which enabled her to shoot her video installation and short film La Marcha del Liquen [The Stride of Lichen] in Antarctica. She is also a cofounder of APECS Mexico.

Presented by the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown (CEHAB).

Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson gave a talk, followed by a reception marking the launch of the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown.

About the Speaker

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician. She is the author of eight books, including the novel Noopiming: A Cure for White Ladies (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), which was short-listed for the Dublin Literary Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. Her album, Theory of Ice (You’ve Changed Records, 2021) was short-listed for the Polaris Music Prize, and she was the 2021 winner of the Prism Prize’s Willie Dunn Award. Her latest project, “Theory of Water,” will be published by Knopf Canada/Haymarket Books in the spring of 2025. She is a member of Alderville First Nation.

Seminar

Brown University students were also invited to a special seminar with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Tuesday, February 11 at 9:30 am.

Presented by the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown.

The Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown (CEHAB) held a reception formally marking its launch.

The center, which was established in July of 2024, emerges from a grass-roots initiative spearheaded by faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students across departments at Brown. Between 2017 and 2024, the initiative built community and catalyzed research on a range of subjects including climate change, the politics of invasive species, and environmental activism. Headed by inaugural director Macarena Gómez-Barris (Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor of Modern Culture and Media), the center continues the important, timely work of the initiative with expanded infrastructure for programing and innovation.

The reception followed an environmental humanities talk, “Theory of Water,” by Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson from 5:30 to 7:00 pm. 

Image: Algarium: Bosques Submarinos, de María Luisa Donoso

This special seminar with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson was open to Brown University students only. 

Confirmed participants received selected readings prior to the conversation as well as information about the location.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson also gave a public lecture at 5:30 pm on February 10. 

About the Speaker

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician. She is the author of eight books, including the novel Noopiming: A Cure for White Ladies (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), which was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. Her album, Theory of Ice (You’ve Changed Records, 2021) was short-listed for the Polaris Music Prize, and she was the 2021 winner of the Prism Prize’s Willie Dunn Award. Her latest project, “Theory of Water,” will be published by Knopf Canada/Haymarket Books in the spring of 2025. She is a member of Alderville First Nation.

Presented by the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown.

Professor of French and Francophone Studies Thangam Ravindranathan will deliver the annual Elizabeth Munves Sherman ’77, P’06 ’09 Lecture in Gender and Sexuality Studies on Thursday, February 13. Ravindranathan’s current book project, titled Unearthly Literature, inquires into literature’s ways of registering environmental degradation.

Talk title: “An Equine Metric for Climate Change? Using Horse Records to Understand the Medieval Climate Anomaly-Little Ice Age Transition in Inner Asian Borderlands”

Can records of horses provide a more detailed picture of the impact of climate change in the Inner Asian steppe? Climate history has increasingly gained traction as a way to understand moments of political rise and decline in Inner Asian history. Increases or decreases in temperature and precipitation, either aggregate or anomalous, have been listed as causes of the fall of the Uyghur Empire, the rise of the Mongol Empire or the declining fortunes of both the Yuan and Ming states in China. The horse was central to Inner Asian political and economic power. Horses were key to transportation, political power projection, pastoral practice, and the making of war. Yet, in climate histories, the horse has troublingly remained a less scrutinized factor: many scholars have assumed that climate variations that are good for grasslands create an animal abundance underpinning military and political success, whereas variation that handicap vegetation produces the opposite. How did warmer or cooler, drier or wetter climes impact horses in Inner Asia attempts by states to manage that change? The political transition from the Mongol Yuan to the Ming Empires stood at the crossroads of a climate transition between the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age from the 13th to 15th centuries. By combining paleoclimatic data for this transition in the Inner Asian steppe borderlands between China and Mongolia with dynastic and official records regarding the horse, I argue this climate transition stressed horse populations, informed southward migration, as well as impelled changes in horse policy that saw animal aid sent north into the steppe, relocated government pastures to more southerly steppe environments, and forced stricter legal regulation of equine bodies. I aim to demonstrate that these changes and policy adaptations exhibited remarkable continuity between the Yuan and Ming, challenging the idea of dynastic disjuncture between Mongol and Chinese states. Last, I suggest that continuity in climate stress on equine populations contributed to more intensive interactions along the Mongol-Ming borderlands.

Aaron Molnar is an Environmental Fellow at Harvard, working on Koryo/Mongol era climate history.

Beginning over 200 years ago, traditional Lakotan pictorial calendars, called “winter counts,” recorded events that members of each community experienced and considered important. These included interactions within the community here on earth as well as celestial events such as eclipses, comets, and the famous Leonid meteor shower in November 1833 that were visible in the Northern Plains skies. The touchstone of this presentation is a Lakotan winter count that records events from 1798 to 1919. Its event “glyphs” provide engaging origin points to explore Lakotan history and traditional narratives related to cosmology and star constellations visible in tonight’s sky.

Speaker Bio: Craig Howe, founder and Director of the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies (CAIRNS), earned a Ph.D. in architecture and anthropology from the University of Michigan. He served as Deputy Assistant Director for Cultural Resources at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Howe has authored articles and book chapters on numerous topics, including tribal histories, Native studies, museum exhibitions, and community collaborations. He has developed innovative tribal histories projects and creative museum exhibitions, lectures on American Indian topics across the U.S., and provides professional development and cultural awareness training to schools and organizations. Howe was raised and lives on his family’s cattle ranch in the Lacreek District of the Pine Ridge Reservation where he is designing and building Wingsprings, an architecturally unique retreat and conference center that is featured in New Architecture on Indigenous Lands. He is a citizen of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

A Pembroke Seminar “Unwriting the Anthropocene” Talk

In this talk Salar Mameni (UC Berkeley) discusses the extreme heat waves, flooding and cyclones that have affected the southern coastal regions of Pakistan, with the most recent flood occurring in summer 2022, through the work of the contemporary Pakistani artist Zahra Malkani. The talk centers Malkani’s soundscapes and visual multi-modal presentations of spiritual, activist, and mourning practices of coastal communities as an entry point into a conversation about climate disasters, extractive economies, aesthetic practices, and indigenous grieving traditions. Through the notion of the “oceanic feeling,” a term Malkani uses for her audio-visual recordings, Mameni discusses the incongruency of the spiritual and the psychoanalytic and how the ocean, and other bodies of water, have come to signify both the depths of the psyche and the ungraspable flows of the sacred.

Salar Mameni is the author of Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics(Duke, 2023) and Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an art historian with expertise in artistic practices in the contemporary Arab/Muslim world with focuson ecological thought. Mameni’s writings have appeared in the journals Catalyst, Ramus, Signs, Qui Parle, Women and Performance, Al-Raida and Resilienceamong others. He has also written for catalogues of exhibitions in Pakistan, Dubai, Sharjah, and Istanbul.

Free and open to the public.

Event accessibility information: To bypass stairs, visitors may enter via the automatic doors at the rear of the building, where there is a wheelchair-accessible elevator.

2:00 - 6:00 p.m.

Reception to follow

What we commonly refer to as the “climate crisis” has also emerged as a crisis in academic discourse, one that conceals overlapping emergencies of environmental ruin, capitalism, and antiblackness. Ecocriticism has been seduced by metaphors of entanglement between the human subject and the nonhuman world. Through an insistence on this speculative mode of vitalism as an ethical and aesthetic praxis, many contemporary ecocritical scholars imagine their work as a form of political resistance or even redress to climate change. But what happens when one recognizes that the unity and legibility of the human subject has eroded? At “The Climate of Critique,” the second colloquium of the Limits of Legibility series hosted by the journal differences, Lynne Huffer (Emory), Axelle Karera (Emory), Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo (Brown) and Jean-Thomas Tremblay (York) challenge the increasingly dominant logic of humanist relationality to think the climate crisis without displacing the social and racial antagonisms that found it. Elizabeth A. Wilson (Emory) will moderate this half-day event.

Free and open to the public.

Event accessibility information: To bypass stairs, visitors may enter via the automatic doors at the rear of the building, where there is a wheelchair-accessible elevator.

Organized by the Data Science Institute and the Data Science DUG, this panel will feature faculty from across various disciplines at Brown who will talk about their career trajectories and how data and data science have become important to their work.

This event is open to all and will be of interest to students who are curious about computational research and how data science, machine learning, and AI play a role across fields. 

Please register in advance for this event.

Featuring:

Baylor Fox-Kemper (Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences). Baylor studies the physics of the ocean and how the ocean fits into the Earth’s climate system, using climate models, satellites, and autonomous observations. His research group studies the physics of the ocean and how the ocean fits into the Earth’s climate system, using models that range from the global scale to focused process models that apply universally. They seek mathematically interesting problems with practical uses. Baylor is presently co-chair of a World Climate Research Program Core Project on Earth System Modelling and Observations.

Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo (David S. Josephson Assistant Professor of Music). SAMMUS aka Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo is a first-gen black feminist rapper, producer, and scholar. Since Fall 2021 she has been a member of the steering committee for Brown’s science, technology, and society program. She is also serving as the Director of Audio at Glow Up Games, the first women-of-color led game studio, and she is a member of theKEEPERS, a Hip Hop collective that is currently developing the most comprehensive digital archive to map the international contributions of womxn and girls across Hip Hop’s 50-year history. Her doctoral research focused on the sociotechnical dynamics that shape the development and use of “community-studios”—recording studios that provide high-quality recording tools, professional sound engineering services, and audio training to communities that often lack financial or social access to these resources.

Brenda Rubenstein (Associate Professor of Chemistry & Physics). Brenda is the incoming Director of the Data Science Institute. Brenda’s research group is focused on developing electronic structure methods that are at once highly accurate and scale well with system size to help bridge this divide and enable theory-driven materials design. The Rubenstein group also actively conducts research in the areas of molecular/quantum computing and computational biophysics.  While the focus of Brenda’s work is on developing new electronic structure methods, she is also deeply engaged in rethinking computing architectures and computational biophysics.

Matt LeBlanc (Assistant Professor of Physics). Matt has lead physics analyses at the LHC on a broad range of topics, including both precision measurements and searches for new physics. His work particularly focuses on the use of hadronic objects and final states to extract new information about the Standard Model and to search for signs of new particles. Beyond searches and measurements, Matt has also held coordination-level positions within ATLAS related to the reconstruction and calibration of hadronic objects.

Diana Freed (Assistant Professor of Data Science and Computer Science). Diana’s research interests are in human-computer interaction (HCI), computer security, privacy, inclusive design, technology policy, and digital health. She works on designing, building, and evaluating sociotechnical systems in the context of youth interpersonal relationships, intimate partner violence, and caregiving systems. She also develops resources to improve digital literacy to enable individuals to make informed choices regarding technology use and to improve understanding of digital risks and harms. She uses qualitative and computational social science methods to develop new tools, technologies, and theories to detect and mitigate digital harms and inequities, facilitate safety, and inform policy.

Elizabeth Chen (Interim Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics, Associate Professor of Medical Science & Health Services, Policy and Practice). Elizabeth’s research involves involves leveraging electronic health data along with health information and communications technology to support biomedical discovery and healthcare delivery. Specific research interests include clinical documentation, clinical decision support, health information needs, standards and interoperability, natural language processing (NLP), and data mining and machine learning.

A reception with the panelists and Data Science DUG will follow this event. 

About the Speaker

Marisol de la Cadena became an anthropologist in Peru, England, France and the USA. She is a professor in the STS and Anthropology departments at UC Davis.

She works on the interfaces of STS and non-STS, major and minor politics, history, and the a-historical, the possible and the impossible. She enjoys thinking about what she calls ethnographic concepts – those that blur the distinction between theory and the empirical and can indicate the limits of both. Overall, I revel in what I call ‘not knowing’ as an epistemic stance. She realized this in Cuzco, as she co-labored with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, father and son, Quechua thinker-doers. They presented her with the eventfulness of the ahistorical, then unfathomable to her, and coached her to grasp that what to me was—a mountain for example–was not only such. Currently, she follows cow-making practices across labscapes and landscapes in Colombia thinking about life and death as intra-connected conceptions.

About the Event

The talk will discuss the economic, biological, and conceptual conditions underpinning the breeding of either cows or cattle in Colombian fincas. Considering this difference has important consequences for life beyond Colombia.

Funded by Alexander Charles Paul Fort MD ’04 and Nicholas McLaury Fort MD ’09 Lectureship on Latin America Fund

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ron Magill is an American wildlife expert, conservationist, and photographer, best known for his role as the communications director at Zoo Miami. With over 40 years of experience in wildlife conservation, Ron has been a passionate advocate for animal welfare, environmental education, and global conservation efforts.

Bringing together archaeologists, historians, contemporary zoo specialists, and conservationists, this interdisciplinary workshop will explore how archaeology and history can inform ethical discussions about modern zoos and the evolving roles, practices, and responsibilities of zoos today.

Throughout the conference, participants will:

• Examine the historical and ethical dimensions of menageries and zoos.

• Develop a framework for evaluating current zoo practices and their ethical implications.

• Discuss how scholars of the past can contribute to contemporary environmental and animal welfare debates.

• Encourage junior scholars to explore how historical and archaeological research can address pressing issues such as biodiversity loss and human and more-than-human rights.

Workshop speakers and discussants from around the globe will share their expertise and experiences on zoos and human-animal relationships. Check out the full event program!

Workshop Day 1 (March 14): 5:30 – 7:30 p.m.

Workshop Day 2 (March 15): 9 a.m. – 7 p.m.

A talk by scholar Heather Davis, followed by a conversation with Xan Chacko (Science, Technology, and Society | Brown University), explored questions of plastics, queerness, infrastructures, and Davis’ interdisciplinary environmental work.

About the Speaker

Heather Davis is an assistant professor of culture and media at Eugene Lang College, the New School. An interdisciplinary scholar working in environmental humanities, media studies, and visual culture, she is interested in how the saturation of fossil fuels has shaped contemporary culture. Her book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022), argues that plastic has transformed the world because of its incredible longevity and range, as it has also transformed our understandings and expectations of matter and materiality. She is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. Her work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation, and she is a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Presented by the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown (CEHAB).

Ati Gunnawi Viviam Misslin Villafaña Izquierdo is a young leader from the Arhuaco people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (Colombia) and a cofounder of the Latin American Youth Climate Scholarship, a platform made up of 25 young activists from all over Latin America and the Caribbean. With experience advocating for and supporting grassroots initiatives for climate justice, Ati is also involved with the Cabildo Arhuaco Magdalena - Guajira, where she coordinates its advocacy efforts.

At this teach-in event, Ati will share her insights on organizing and alliance building for environmental and climate justice. She will discuss the territorial and global initiatives and collaborations she is part of, including her work in international fora. She will also share her experience with building common understanding and bridging communities. In addition to sharing her own work, Ati will be in conversation with attendees about their experiences and initiatives.

The tone of the meeting is informal and participatory. Food will be served!

We are pleased to invite you to join our next spring session of the Elemental Media Lab: “CROSS POLLINATION” a faculty and graduate student flash panel. We will meet Tuesday, March 18th, 6-7pm for this next installment and hope you will join us for dinner afterwards as well. This meeting will be held at the Cogut, Andrew’s House in room 310.

Since space is limited, RSVP is required. Please RSVP if you would like to join. We are thrilled to host short 3-4 minute flash presentations by the following:

• Amanda Macedo Macedo (TAPS): “Echoes of a Disappearing Giant: Sounding the Elemental in Media and Matter”

• Elisa Giardina Papa (MCM): “She Flickered In and Out of History”

• Istifaa Ahmed (AMST): “Light, Skin, and Chemical: At the Beginning and End of the World”

• J.M. Nimocks (MCM): “Reflections on the role of deceit in vitalist philosophy”

• K Yin (AMST): “What Remains: Asian/Rock Form(ation)s”

• Sara Ossana (RISD): “Space, Place, Becoming and Unbecoming: A Question of the Alchemical”

• Tao Leigh Goffe (Hunter College-CUNY): “You gonna run to the rocks / The rocks will be melting”

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April 1st Seminar

Climate Adaptation in the AI Era

Claudio Battiloro (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, National Studies on Air Pollution and Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)

In conversation with Roberta De Vito, Brown Biostatistics and Data Science Institute

Climate change is intensifying natural hazards and exacerbating inequities, with wide-ranging effects on health, society, and economies. AI and ML can empower resilience—by enabling data-driven planning, equitable interventions, and resource management—but they are also heightening the urgency to address the technology’s environmental footprint. To balance these dual goals, we must bridge technical gaps, such as handling complex, large-scale, and misaligned spatiotemporal data, and adopt a holistic vision that emphasizes both AI for resilience and resilience to AI.

Bio: Claudio Battiloro is a Postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a former Visiting Associate at the SEAS of the University of Pennsylvania. He received a M.Sc. cum laude in Data Science and a Ph.D. cum laude in Information and Communication Technologies from Sapienza University of Rome. Claudio’s research interests include (broadly) AI for Health and Climate, theory and methods for topological signal processing and deep learning, and distributed stochastic optimization. He has over 30 publications, including papers published in top-tier journals (e.g., Journal on Machine Learning Research, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on IoT and IEEE Transaction on Green Communications and Networking) and conferences (e.g. ICLR, ICML ,ICASSP, and IJCNN). Claudio received different awards, such as the IEEE SPS Italian Chapter Best M.Sc. Thesis Award (2020), and the GTTI Best Ph.D. Thesis Award (2024). 

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Data Matters is intended to stimulate conversations and collaboration by bringing multiple perspectives to challenging data-driven problems and talks are structured to be more of an interactive experience than traditional academic seminars. Data Matters includes scholars with backgrounds in the physical, biological, computational, and social sciences who share their perspectives on why data matters.

Held on select Tuesdays at 3:00pm at the Data Science Institute.

2024-2025 Pembroke Center Research Roundtable

• Featuring:
• Susana Draper (Princeton)
• Avery Gordon (UC Santa Barbara)
• Tyrone S. Palmer (Wesleyan)
• Kali Rubaii (Purdue)

This roundtable will address forms of writing at the edge of life. It will consider modes of writing and artistic form that can respond to our current moment of racial capital, colonial enclosure and ecological devastation–inclusive of daily calamities and resurfacing joys. Dissolution, disturbance, and deformation are keywords for this coming together.

This event was organized by Postdoctoral Fellows Patricia Ekpo, Sarah Richter, María Gloria Robalino, and Eda Tarak. The event represents the culmination of the year-long Pembroke Center research seminar, “Unwriting the Anthropocene,” convened by Macarena Gómez-Barris, Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Chair of Modern Culture and Media.

Free and open to the public.

Event accessibility information: To bypass stairs, visitors may enter via the automatic doors at the rear of the building, where there is a wheelchair-accessible elevator.

This panel discussion will consider the impacts and potential implications of recent policies and actions of the US administration and its affiliates related to data availability, use, and continuity. The panelists will approach these issues from a wide variety of standpoints, including economics, public health, foreign policy and national security, and climate research, in addition to data and computer science. Themes will include the short- and long-term effects of interruptions to federal data availability and collection, the fate of data-sharing agreements with US allies, the confirmed and potential effects of wide-ranging DOGE access to the private data of US citizens and residents (including the use of AI technologies on such data), data and economic/trade policy, and how earlier data-gathering strategies relate to present ones. 

Introduction by Brenda Rubenstein, Incoming Director of the Data Science Institute.

This symposium will investigate how and why people keep seeds—forms of matter that literally bring life and figuratively feed futures. In this symposium, organizers and participants hope to weave together diverse expertise to better define which seed keeping practices existed in the past, what seed keeping looks like in the present, how seed banks operate—and to what purpose. 

Participants will address several key questions, beginning with why seed banks are created. For example, are seed futures only built in contexts of insecurity or under conditions of active threat? Or are seeds ever kept without a sense of loss, or curated simply to curate? Participants will examine why people collect seeds and what they perceive themselves to be protecting by creating seed collections. 

More practically, this symposium will also address the various ways that seed banks are physically built and curated, and some of the challenges people face in their efforts to protect seeds and linked cultural knowledge. When and in which ways can saved seeds be used? To restore biodiversity, to amplify sustainability, or to forestall crop failure or other disasters? Likewise, are there times when saved seeds may never be used (left for posterity, for spiritual entities, for the earth, or to protect a global archive)? Also, how long are seeds in a seed bank viable for germination, and how does this impact planning for the future? 

Visit the Seed Pasts / Seeding Futures website for the full schedule and information about each participant. 

Note: Registration for this event will be capped at 80 attendees. Please complete the form below to ensure your spot.

On Earth Day, join the Global Environmental Justice Working Group and IBES for a powerful and wide-ranging conversation on global environmental justice. This symposium brings together distinguished scholars and activists working at the forefront of environmental justice movements around the world.

Through a moderated panel discussion followed by small group conversations with individual panelists, the symposium will explore how communities across diverse global contexts are responding to ecological degradation, defending land rights, and advancing Indigenous and environmental justice.

• Joan Martinez-Alier: Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. Co-founder of the Environmental Justice Atlas and recipient of the 2020 Balzan Prize and 2023 Holberg Prize for his contributions to ecological economics and political ecology.
• Stha Yeni: Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Researcher and advocate with over 15 years of experience in land rights and agrarian transformation.
• Hendro Sangkoyo: Co-founder of the School of Democratic Economics, Indonesia. An educator and activist focused on grassroots environmental knowledge and democratic resource governance.
• Lucía Ixchiu: Mayan K’iche journalist, artist, and feminist from Guatemala. Co-founder of Festivales Solidarios, a collective that promotes Indigenous rights and environmental defense through cultural activism.

The event will include light refreshments and beverages (vegetarian and vegan options included). Attendees will have the opportunity to engage directly with speakers during post-panel informal discussions.

Event schedule

4–5:15 – Panel discussion and Q&A in Andrews 110
5:15–5:30 – Snack and hydration break in Andrews 106
5:30–6:30 – Small group discussions in break-out rooms with individual panelists

• Group 1 with Joan Martinez Alier in Andrews 110
• Group 2 with Stha Yeni in Andrews 106
• Group 3 with Hendro Sangkoyo in Andrews 006
• Group 4 with Lucía Ichiu in Andrews 310
  

Abstract:
Based on the author’s recently published book, Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China (Princeton, 2023), this talk explores fengshui’s invocations in Chinese law during the Qing dynasty. Facing a growing population, dwindling natural resources, and an overburdened rural government, judicial administrators across China grappled with disputes and petitions about fengshui in their efforts to sustain forestry, farming, mining, and city planning. Laws of the Land offers a radically new interpretation of these legal arrangements: they worked. An intelligent, considered, and sustained engagement with fengshui on the ground helped the imperial state keep the peace and maintain its legitimacy, especially during the increasingly turbulent decades of the nineteenth century. As the century came to an end, contentious debates over industrialization swept across the bureaucracy, with fengshui invoked by officials and scholars opposed to the establishment of railways, telegraphs, and foreign-owned mines. Demonstrating that the only way to understand those debates and their profound stakes is to grasp fengshui’s longstanding roles in Chinese public life, Laws of the Land rethinks key issues in the history of Chinese law, politics, science, religion, and economics.

Bio:
Tristan Brown is a historian of early modern China at MIT. His research interests include the history of science, law, and religion, as well as environmental history. His current project examines the social and cultural history of Muslim communities in Ming Dynasty China (1368-1644).

This paper, which is part of a larger project on natural and human-made disasters in Late Antiquity, examines the period after the siege, earthquake, or epidemic, when people attempted to return to their homes, livelihoods, and communities. It will examine a range of responses to the post-disaster environment, from legal recourses to reclaim lost property and institutionally backed drives for rebuilding on the one hand, to locally inflected rituals of cleansing and ecclesiastical practices of communal expiation on the other. While taking into account the many “survivor” stories from Late Antiquity, we shall emphasize how the differential impacts of disasters necessarily undercut any simplistic narrative of recovery and “resilience,” especially when we examine these impacts on local scales.

About the Speaker

Professor Kristina Sessa (AB, Princeton; PhD UC Berkeley) is a cultural and social historian of Late Antiquity, with a strong (and relatively recent) interest in environmental topics. She is currently writing a book about late ancient responses to and experiences of natural and human-made disasters. She teaches ancient and medieval history at The Ohio State University.

Forum: 12:30–1:30pm at 85 Waterman St, Room 130 & Livestream

Reception: 1:30–2:30pm at 85 Waterman St Room 101/102

The federal landscape of climate law and policy is shifting rapidly. How are experts in public interest law, academia and government navigating these changes, and what legal and policy actions are emerging in response? Hear from a panel of leading voices in climate law and policy for an insightful discussion on the current outlook and evolving strategies. Engage with the panel, ask your questions, and continue the conversation at a post-forum reception hosted by the Institute at Brown for Environment & Society. Forum co-sponsored by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

Featured speakers:

• Michael Burger ’96, Executive Director, Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia University Law School
• Peter Neronha P’19, P’22, Rhode Island Attorney General
• Wendy Schiller, Howard R. Swearer Interim Director, Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Institute for International and Public Affairs & Alison S. Ressler Professor of Political Science
• Moderated by Carrie Nordlund ’05 PhD, Lecturer in International and Public Affairs & Assistant Dean, Division of Pre-College and Undergraduate Programs