Graduate Student Conference « Environmental Arts and Humanities at Oregon State University

ENVIRONMENTAL ARTS AND HUMANITIES

10th ANNUAL REGIONAL GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE 2024

Oregon State University

Tuesday, May 14, 2024

ALL DAY

In partnership with the annual Environmental Joint Campus Conference (JCC)

IN-PERSON (Memorial Union Room 109)

zoom link will be posted here on the day of the event

visitor parking info: https://transportation.oregonstate.edu/parking/visitors

FEATURING

Keynote event (430pm):

“Russia, the Destruction of the World’s Whales, and the Nature of the Twentieth Century” with Ryan Tucker Jones

Ryan Tucker Jones is Ann Swindells Professor of Global Environmental History at the University of Oregon. He is author of Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea (2014) and Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling (2022).

KEY PARTNERS:

OSU ENVIRONMENTAL ARTS AND HUMANITIES INITIATIVE

OSU ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE GRADUATE PROGRAM

SPRING CREEK PROJECT FOR IDEAS, NATURE, AND THE WRITTEN WORD

Opening remarks and coffee: 845am

Session 1: 9-1020am

Stephen Hood (PSU), “Lords of the Sidewalks: The Bicycle Craze of 1895-1905 in Portland, Oregon”

Dhruv Modi (UO), ““How do climate-related migration forecasts imagine human migration?”

Patrick Conraads (OSU), “”Tumbling into Snapper: The Department of Defense’s Role in the 1952 Tumbler-Snapper Nuclear Weapons Tests”

Anu Sugathan (UO), “Rivers of Resilience: Cultural Narratives and Environmental Advocacy in River of Stories”

Session 2: 1030-1150am

Gabiel Ayayia (OSU), “African Ubuntu Philosophy and U.S. Food Pantries: Enhancing Community Through Sharing”

Miranda Luiz (PNCA/Willamette), “(con)sent to be cut: Fred Moten’s Ecopoetics”

Carina Kusaka (OSU), “From Research to Storybook: Communicating Coastal Conservation through Penny the Puffin”

Case Pharr (OSU), “Crossing the Form/Content Divide: Thinking Defamiliarization in the Anthropocene”

Poster Session: 12-130pm

This poster session is held jointly with the Joint Campus Conference for environmental graduate students at OSU, PSU, and UO

Session 3: 130-250pm

Esther Herron (PNCA/Willamette), “Creative Impulse, Materiality, and Nature”

Thien-Kim Bui (PSU), “Deliberating the past, re-storying the future: water conflict, governance, and imaginaries in the Upper Klamath Basin”

Henry Pitts (OSU), “From Dust”

Delaney Chabot (OSU), “Bull (kelp) by the Horns: Blending Ecology and Music”

Session 4: 3-420pm

Avery Fischer (PSU), “The Fight to Save Dying Water: Citizen Activism against Water Pollution, 1900-1938”

Jackson Cooper (OSU), “Fungal Naturalisms: Gender and Sexuality in Fungal Gothic Literature”

Genevieve Pfeiffer (UO), Saving the Whales: Surveillance and Data Collection of North American Right Whales

Aidan Sundine (OSU), An Environment Half Full: Discussing the Efficacy of Optimistic and Pessimistic Message Framing

430pm keynote with Ryan Tucker Jones

6pm (optional) post-conference tater tots

Abstracts (graduate student presenters)

Gabriel Ayayia (OSU)

African Ubuntu Philosophy and U.S. Food Pantries: Enhancing Community Through Sharing

Food insecurity remains a pressing issue, exacerbated by systemic racism and socioeconomic disparities. In this study, I argue African Philosophy of Ubuntu, which stresses communal interdependence—summarized by the phrase “I am because we are”—can enrich the operations of food pantries in fostering community support and resource sharing. This study aims to show that food pantries, beyond their role in distributing food, can enhance communal bonds by embodying Ubuntu’s principles of empathy, cooperation, and mutual care. This approach contributes to a more sustainable, community-focused solution to food insecurity.

Thien-Kim Bui (PSU), “Deliberating the past, re-storying the future: water conflict, governance, and imaginaries in the Upper Klamath Basin”

Water availability is influenced by several factors, including 1) environmental (e.g., precipitation, groundwater availability); 2) legal, (e.g., the prior appropriation doctrine, which determines who can use water and how much); and 3) political, cultural, and social norms about and practiced through water, referred to in this research as “hydrosocial imaginaries”. This project uses hydrosocial imaginaries as a theoretical lens to understand how different groups navigate water governance and conflict to collaborate in ways that respond to drought, climate change, and water scarcity. Pairing legal, narrative, and discourse analyses with collaborative cartography, this research offers a way to study competing hydrosocial imaginaries in contentious watersheds to improve sustainable water resource management.

Delaney Chabot (OSU)

Bull (kelp) by the Horns: Blending Ecology and Music

You may have heard the story of bull kelp collapse and the population explosion of purple sea urchins, but have you heard the music? In this talk, I’ll introduce my doctoral research in kelp forest and intertidal ecology and how it relates to my PRAx art & science fellowship. I’ll talk about blending ecosystems, possible phase shift spillover, and migrating urchins.

Patrick Conraads (OSU)

Tumbling into Snapper: The Department of Defense’s Role in the 1952 Tumbler-Snapper Nuclear Weapons Tests

The outbreak of the Korean War made many in the Department of Defense think that nuclear weapons would be used tactically like conventional explosives in the near future, whether they were used by American or Communist forces. This made it imperative for military leaders to expose soldiers to simulated atomic warfare so that they were psychologically prepared to share a battlefield with these terrifying new weapons. In the months leading up to the 1952 Tumber-Snapper Test Series at the Nevada Proving Grounds, the Department of Defense developed a weapons test criterion independent of the Atomic Energy Commission that would place soldiers in trenches close to the detonation site and then proceed to conduct drills in a freshly irradiated landscape.

Jackson Cooper (OSU)

Fungal Naturalisms: Gender and Sexuality in Fungal Gothic Literature

While the discourse around fungi in the Anglophone world has recently expanded from its historical mycophobia to embrace affects of awe and wonder, fungi are still operating as figures of disruption and fear in literature. Taken from my thesis project, this presentation will demonstrate how placing critical, disciplinary examinations of mycology in conversation with contemporary fungal representations in gothic literature illuminates some of the limitations and opportunities that mycophobic portrayals of fungi in Anglophone literature affords. By reading against the grain of these texts’ rhetorical deployment of Anglophone mycophobias, we can begin to see how, even in works that are built around these fears as its central conceit, the radically queer nature of fungi as a phylum allows potential queer alternatives to systematization to emerge.

Avery Fischer (PSU)

The Fight to Save Dying Water: Citizen Activism against Water Pollution, 1900-1938

At the turn of the Twentieth century, Oregon rivers were facing a pollution crisis. The deteriorating conditions led Oregonians, both private citizens and public officials, to call for action: to study, understand, and ultimately stop the pollution. This movement ultimately lead to the creation of Oregon’s first environmental protection agency: the Oregon State Sanitary Authority.

Esther Herron (PNCA/Willamette)

Creative Impulse, Materiality, and Nature

Art, as a language, is a necessary tool for expression and resistance. Artistic practice also utilizes materials often detrimental to the environment; either by how they are made, the waste they create, or the labor used. Herron will discuss how her art explores the relationship between artist, material, Nature, and the importance of questioning the status quo.

Stephen Hood (PSU)

Lords of the Sidewalks: The Bicycle Craze of 1895-1905 in Portland, Oregon

During the end of the nineteenth century, as bicycle ownership increased in cities across the United States, so too rose a culture of speeding through urban streets. Those speeding cyclists, who endangered children, pedestrians, and themselves, were referred to as “scorchers” and deemed a serious threat to public safety. The behavior of scorchers required an organized effort among residents of Portland, Oregon—at the time, home to the largest bicycle showroom west of the Mississippi—to alter the urban environment by creating a separate space for bicycles within the city and punishing those cyclists who endangered themselves and others.

Carina Kusaka (OSU)

From Research to Storybook: Communicating Coastal Conservation through Penny the Puffin

To protect vulnerable wildlife species and their habitats, we need an all-hands-on-deck approach, with diverse individuals, disciplines, and communities coming together to address challenges. To communicate my PhD research to a broader audience, I am hand-painting and writing a children’s book about tufted puffins and their habitat in the Pacific Northwest. Using art as a tool, we can make important ecological research more accessible and meaningful to all, fostering curiosity and excitement for conservation.

Miranda Luiz (PNCA/Willamette)

“(con)sent to be cut: Fred Moten’s Ecopoetics”

This presentation will look closely at the literary strategies of Fred Moten’s trilogy consent not to be a single being and how this work sits in conversation with theoretical physics, critical theory, and contemporary ecopraxis. Revising and evolving Édouard Glissant’s notion of relation, Moten takes up entanglement as an ecological and abolitionist mode of knowledge production and metaphysical critique. Thinking, not just of entanglement, but with and through entanglement aesthetics and epistemologies, Moten offers us inventive and indispensable methodologies for ecological and ecopoetic thought.

Dhruv Modi (UO)

How do climate-related migration forecasts imagine human migration?

In the last two decades many prominent studies have attempted to develop models to forecast/project the future of climate-change induced human migration. These efforts continue despite the fact that most researchers in the field (including the modelers themselves) believe that realistic predictions of such a complex phenomenon are functionally impossible to make. In my presentation, I aim to sketch out some of the political forces that animate these models through the framework provided by Science and Technology Studies and Sheila Jasanoff’s concept of socio-technical imaginaries.

Genevieve Pfeiffer (UO)

Saving the Whales: Surveillance and Data Collection of North American Right Whales

As a result of ocean warming, the North American Right Whale has altered its migration, now passing through the St. Lawrence Bay, one of the most heavily trafficked bays in the world, causing ship strikes of the critically endangered whales. To mitigate deaths, the Canadian government has adopted a program which triangulates whale’s location based off sonic detection. This presentation explores the ethics of whale as datafied subject.

Case Pharr (OSU)

Crossing the Form/Content Divide: Thinking Defamiliarization in the Anthropocene

Pertaining to the formal dishabituation of everyday objects, routines, and environments, defamiliarization has long been a privileged concept in literary studies, emerging with the Russian Formalists in 1917 and remaining important up to the contemporary moment. Yet, in the age of anthropogenic climate change, the world itself threatens to be rendered entirely unfamiliar including those things which are the typical domain of defamiliarizing literary language. This paper argues that the Anthropocene, with its notions of human geologic agency and uncanny environments as described by Amitav Ghosh, may cause a qualitative shift in the literary concept of defamiliarization, allowing us to divorce it from its strictly formal definition and think about what happens to literature when the content of our daily lives and works of fiction become radically unfamiliar.

Henry Pitts (OSU)

From Dust

As the American West continues to battle the increasing effects of climate change, finding new ways to connect to drying landscapes will prove critical. My work uses bodies to mimic the flow of water, where the Chewaucan River flows into Lake Abert. As you watch, or run, consider your own water bodies.

Anu Sugathan (UO)

Rivers of Resilience: Cultural Narratives and Environmental Advocacy in River of Stories

River of Stories by Orijit Sen is a seminal Indian graphic novel that examines the intersections of environmental justice, postcolonialism, and indigenous rights within the context of large-scale infrastructure projects, particularly the Sardar Sarovar Dam in the Narmada valley, India. Through diverse characters and narratives, the novel exposes the detrimental impacts of such projects on marginalized communities and ecosystems, offering a multifaceted critique of contemporary development paradigms. By unraveling these multifaceted realities, the paper aims to shed light on the socio-economic disparities, cultural upheavals, and environmental degradation inherent in such infrastructural projects.