TORCH EVENT
Wednesday 18 November 2020, 2.30pm Online - registration required
Recording available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-GkWfB2gIk&list=PLbPH9ZxV_xgy1CskqxrarjkbKTo078hxw
In October 2020, California experienced its first “gigafire” – a burn event of over 1,000,000 acres; but of course, this is just one instance of climatological precarity among a long and growing list of others. Stories such as these do motivate some people to action. But, we also see that much of the public discourse surrounding environmental deterioration continues to pivot upon policy and science messaging that, while substantively essential, may not always appeal to the affective, sensed or felt dimensions of the environmental harms multiplying around us.
In this presentation, we draw from two of our anthropological research projects—the first on wind power development in Mexico and the other on the loss of ice in Iceland—to highlight alternative forms of climate communication that are research-driven and public-facing. Our work on aeolian politics in Mexico and our collaborative text, a “duograph,” begin the discussion and we close with reflections on our August 2019 installation of the world’s first memorial to a fallen glacier, Okjökull. Speakers: Cymene Howe is Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. Her books include Intimate Activism (Duke 2013) and Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke 2019), which follows the human and more than- human lives intertwined with renewable energy futures. Dominic Boyer teaches at Rice University where he also served as Founding Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (2013-2019).