ENVIRONMENTAL ARTS AND HUMANITIES
REGIONAL GRADUATE CONFERENCE 2023
Oregon State University
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
9AM to 5PM
IN-PERSON (Memorial Union Room 208) & ZOOM
ZOOM link here
visitor parking info: https://transportation.oregonstate.edu/parking/visitors
FEATURING
Keynote event (4pm): “The Secret Lives of Glaciers” with M Jackson
Dr. M Jackson is a geographer and science communicator exploring the intersections of gender, glaciology, and climate change. Jackson is a National Geographic Society Explorer, TED Fellow, and three-time U.S. Fulbright Scholar. Jackson earned a doctorate from the University of Oregon, a Master of Science degree from the University of Montana, and serves as a U.S. Fulbright Ambassador and an Expert for National Geographic Expeditions. Jackson is the author of The Ice Sings Back (2023), The Secret Lives of Glaciers (2019), and While Glaciers Slept (2015). Jackson is currently the Climate and Energy host for Crash Course and the lead scientist on Netflix’s series Pirate Gold of Adak Island. Learn more at www.drmjackson.com
Partners
OSU Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative
Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word
OSU Environmental Science Graduate Program
Contact: jacob.hamblin@oregonstate.edu
Program and Abstracts
Session 1: 9-1030
Melanie Douville (OSU), “Art of Mapling: Creative Encounters with the World’s Largest Sugaring Tree”
Maryam Amiri (PSU), “Everyday Ecologies and Reproduction of Ethnic Relationships in the Oil City”
Hannah Ariesen (OSU), “An Ecopoetic Perspective on the Sublime Knowledge of Trees”
Hilary Blum (Claremont Graduate University), “Contaminated Narratives: Public Relations, Public History, and Hanford’s Environmental Impact”
Session 2: 1035-1145 (moderated by Marilyn Jordan)
Annalee Ring (UO), Feminist Phenomenology of Language and Landscape: Conversations in the Flesh
Daniel Salomon (PSU), “Ableism and Anthropocentrism in Communicative Planning: An Adult Autistic Self-Advocate Perspective”
Anita Spaeth (OSU), “A Field Guide to Pasture: Critical Art Practices and Place-based Learning on and about Regional Small-Scale Livestock Farms”
Lunch: 12-1 (vegetarian tacos: grad students and faculty are welcome)
Session 3: 1-230 (moderated by Ehren Pflugfelder)
Kathleen Gekiere (UO), “Through Alien ‘Eyes’: Spectacle Mediating Nonhuman Agency in Nope (2022)”
Claire Spaulding (PNCA/Willamette), ““Geoempathy: an Entanglement of Site and Self”
Katherine Cusumano (OSU), “Dredging It Up: Creative Research and Writing About Compromised Environments”
Sarah De La Rosa (OSU), “Land Agents: A Discussion of the Ethics of Non-Human Actors in Policing U.S. Borders”
Session 4: 235-345
Ian Halter (UO), “Deciding the Nature of Empire: Colonial Visions of Wealth, Wonder, and Woe in Alaska Native Homelands, to 1897”
Sarah Preston (UO), “‘A State of Want’: Advertising and Toxicity in Environmental Justice Literature”
Haley McKinnon (OSU), “Totem, target, tragedy: analyzing human relationships with cetaceans in the progression of the Anthropocene”
Keynote: 4-5ish
M Jackson, “The Secret Lives of Glaciers”
Abstracts (graduate student presenters)
Maryam Amiri, “Everyday Ecologies and Reproduction of Ethnic Relationships in the Oil City”
My research examines how environmental degradation due to oil production operations contributes to changing racial and ethnic relationships and further marginalizes certain groups of the population by disrupting their social reproduction. My case study is Ahwaz, a metropolitan area in the oil-rich province of Khuzestan, Iran.
Hannah Ariesen, “An Ecopoetic Perspective on the Sublime Knowledge of Trees”
Trees are in constant communication with other beings, and that includes us. In a world that is filled with so much noise, many have simply forgotten how to listen. Poetry provides just one of many opportunities for us to remember how. From an ecopoetic perspective, the artist presents a potential for translation that aims to put words to the interactions and relationships between the human and non-human that do not always need words to exist.
Hilary Blum, “Contaminated Narratives: Public Relations, Public History, and Hanford’s Environmental Impact”
In the early post-war period a new motivation for secrecy—controlling public opinion—developed out of the fear that public opinion had the power to cripple the American nuclear program and the Hanford plutonium site. In order to foster positive public opinion of the site, Hanford officials used classification, misinformation, and obfuscation to manipulate public opinion and to present a narrative of Hanford that was centered around safety and the superiority of American science and technology. Hanford officials feared that public knowledge of Hanford’s environmental impact would threaten this narrative, and therefore suppressed information on Hanford’s environmental toll and instead spread misleading information that supported their narrative. Their efforts were largely successful and significantly shaped public opinion, public memory, and, as a result, public history of the site.
Katherine Cusumano, “Dredging It Up: Creative Research and Writing About Compromised Environments”
Four hundred years ago, the land was a salt marsh; two hundred, and it was a major industrial hub; and today, it’s a toxic waste site in central Brooklyn. What can the literary essay contribute to understanding the ways communities live alongside the consequences of such environmental exploitation? This presentation will explore how writers of nonfiction can leverage interdisciplinary research tools — including interviews, digging into archives, and firsthand observation — to make sense of people’s complicated and often dissonant relationship with their environments. The discussion will be followed by a short reading.
Sarah De La Rosa, “Land Agents: A Discussion of the Ethics of Non-Human Actors in Policing U.S. Borders”
Since the inception of border security in the form of walls and militarized border forces in the mid-1990s, migrants attempting to cross the U.S. southwest border have been experiencing higher mortality every year. This increase in death is a direct result of border policy which intentionally pushes aspiring migrants to cross through the most dangerous areas of the desert. This paper will show that this funnel effect into the desert not only weaponizes this piece of terrain against humans, but also violates the agency of the desert itself as a nonhuman actor and deprives migrants on U.S. soil from their U.S. constitutionally granted right to due process.
Melanie Douville, “Art of Mapling: Creative Encounters with the World’s Largest Sugaring Tree”
For this interdisciplinary project, I draw on learning theories from the field of non-formal outdoor education, perspectives from environmental ethics, and methods from the visual arts to create engaging artwork and activities that spark curiosity about bigleaf maples. I capture this project in two parts–a written essay, and a photo journal that communicates my personal narrative throughout the process. While exploring the vocabulary and challenging reality of working between fields of science and art, I question what it means to do interdisciplinary work from within an institutional framework, and what it could mean to embrace limitless, anti-disciplinary structures of education and learning.
Kathleen Gekiere, “Through Alien ‘Eyes’: Spectacle Mediating Nonhuman Agency in Nope (2022)”
As horse trainers, a former child star and a mysterious UFO clash in the Agua Dulce desert, Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022), replete with nonhuman actors, presents a generative model for considering the possibilities and constraints of non-human representations within media. Weaving frameworks established by Derrida, De Bord and Benjamin, I analyze the ways in which nonhuman beings are shaped and molded into images for consumption, as well as their resistance to this control. As the forces of Hollywood production clash with the gazes of nonhuman beings, Nope points toward avenues to disrupt the aesthetically captivating distractions of capitalism and the destructive impulses they inspire, highlighting the possibilities of nonhuman agents as forces of disruption and interruption of systems of exploitation.
Ian Halter, “Deciding the Nature of Empire: Colonial Visions of Wealth, Wonder, and Woe in Alaska Native Homelands, to 1897”
Decades before John Muir, colonizers from both Russia and the United States made claims about Alaska’s physical environs that flattered themselves and bolstered their respective empires’ pretensions to possession. Sale of those pretensions to the U.S. in 1867 produced a setting in which Russian claims of this sort existed alongside settler newcomers’ deliberations over the same. Focused on the years following, this presentation demonstrates how colonizers’ appraisals of Alaskan nature–as worthless or invaluable, the height of sublime or hell on earth–proved vital to the ways in which settlers imagined, and debated, Alaska’s place in the imperial fold.
Haley McKinnon, “Totem, target, tragedy: analyzing human relationships with cetaceans in the progression of the Anthropocene”
Humans have always been fascinated with whales; from prominent features in mythology, to stories of terrifying monsters on the high seas, to globalized utility, to symbolic wildness, how have human relationships with whales been understood throughout time? As the anthropocene progresses, Westernized human interaction with the natural world has shifted to domination rather than relationality, and whaling offers a particular case study of historical natural resource use, emphasizing the development of a Human Exemptionalism Paradigm. Whales have also been used as the face of ecological awe in environmentalism campaigns, but have failed to be truly “saved” from a capitalist epistemology.
Sarah Preston, “‘A State of Want’: Advertising and Toxicity in Environmental Justice Literature”
In this talk, I will discuss my dissertation project, “A State of Want,” which examines the short stories and well-known contemporary Chicanx, Native American, and Asian American novels of Helena María Viramontes, Thomas King, and Ruth Ozeki as they are a part of, and represent in their literature, communities who are at a high risk of being harmed by environmental injustices and toxic discourses. It explores representations of advertising in these literary texts set against the backdrop of the advertising climate when they were written to expose the entangled nature of discursive and material toxins. This provides an analysis of the articulation between ideology and economics and the pathways this articulation creates for the movement of material toxins, especially to marginalized communities, through persistent racist capitalist systems.
Annalee Ring, Feminist Phenomenology of Language and Landscape: Conversations in the Flesh
This paper will place Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Val Plumwood’s work together to develop a philosophy of landscape based on dialogue. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature and perception suggests a pre-reflective dialogue with the world around us. Merleau-Ponty’s work argues that there are also cultural and historic influences on perception. Plumwood’s work will be placed in conversation with Merleau-Ponty’s because she can fill in some of these habits of perception, especially of the natural world. Further, Plumwood’s attention to power asymmetries will fill in the cultural and historic milieu that Merleau-Ponty names but does not describe.
Daniel Salomon, “Ableism and Anthropocentrism in Communicative Planning: An Adult Autistic Self-Advocate Perspective”
Salomon’s presentation will develop the environmental arts and humanities implications of his co-authored academic journal commentary, “Ableism in Communicative Planning: An Autistic Perspective” in the Special 2022 Planning Theory & Practice Issue devoted to “Disability Justice and Urban Planning.” Salomon will focus on the story which was published in the journal commentary, his own story as an Adult Autistic Self-Advocate submitting testimony to the City Council of Portland to save the trees of Block Seven in his neighborhood of Goose Hollow in Portland Oregon. Salomon will elaborate on his difficulty communicating his concern for the intrinsic value of the trees of Block Seven, their interconnectivity to the ecological whole and service of building climate resilience beyond his own self-interest as a personal stakeholder because his testimony had to fit within the constraints of private property rights, Portland’s Title Eleven Law which was intended to protect mature trees on private/public property and the expertise of Portland’s urban forester to be taken seriously by the Portland City Council. Salomon will relate this story of being intimidated from talking passionately beyond his own self-interest on behalf of the planet to the Critical Disability Studies/Critical Autism Studies literature cited in the journal commentary which tells a very different story about the lives of most Autistic People than Autistic Swedish Youth Climate Activist Gretta Thurburg being able to freely, passionately and selflessly, speak on behalf of the planet, while offering a pathway forward to make sure Adult Autistic Self-Advocate narratives are recognized and taken seriously by city-level planning processes.
Anita Spaeth, “A Field Guide to Pasture: Critical Art Practices and Place-based Learning on and about Regional Small-Scale Livestock Farms”
Livestock farming embodies one of humankind’s most entangled relationships with the natural world. However, on a smaller scale it stands to enact land-use and subsistence-based practices predicated on reciprocity and care. My thesis project involves the use of place-based learning and creative field methodologies to understand this entanglement, culminating in an artist publication featuring poetry and photography. The work ultimately seeks to express the value of creative experiential learning opportunities as means to cultivate curious encounters with the more-than-human world and our place within it.
Claire Spaulding, ““Geoempathy: an Entanglement of Site and Self”
To be caught off guard by a fissure, surface, or geologic feature is to experience geoempathy. A combination of geologic and empathy, the term begs to be unfolded, built up, embraced and explored through as it evokes movement and personification simultaneously. This presentation examines the research and concepts combining towards a definition of geoempathy within aesthetic theory, landscape architecture, art history, and environmentalism. Grounding the etymology of empathy to its roots in the Germanic Einfuhlung, I present the development of the term towards a sense of identic and eidetic engagement with landscape. In proposing this term into the lexicon of environmental studies, I consider a future of landscapes’ entanglement between self and site. With a sense of déjà vu in mind, geoempathy is a jolt of recognition that jostles the memory of singular place into a collective landscape and understanding of the self situated within it.
