This symposium will address recent discourses and practices that define our complex relationship with nature and culture in this political moment. The notions of fact and evidence have acquired an unprecedented level of fluidity - have we now entered the age of "post-truth politics"? How is the complicated relationship between art and science impacted by these cultural turns? How might contested notions of truth shape essential research questions and methodologies? The representations, policies, and lived experiences of climate change are a point of culmination for all of these concerns, and the focus of this event.
This symposium is co-sponsored by SAIC's Departments of Liberal Arts and Photography.
SAIC Ballroom, 112 S. Michigan Ave., 2nd Floor
Schedule of Events
9:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m.
WORKSHOP: Banner Making for the People's Climate March and the March for Science Chicago
Aram Han Sifuentes will guide participants in creating protest banners for the People's Climate March (April 29th in DC) and the March for Science Chicago (April 22nd in Chicago). After the election, Han began the project, Protest Banner Lending Library as a space for people to gain skills to learn how to make their own banners.
Workshop facilitator
Aram Han Sifuentes of the Protest Banner Lending Library
Graduate assistants: Yarima Elena Hernandez Perez and Israel Renee Pate
Break
1:00-1:15 p.m.
Symposium Introduction: Tiffany Holmes
Tiffany Holmes joined by Giovanni Aloi, Mick Tosca, and Andrew Yang
1:15-2:15 p.m.
Panel 1
Truths: Searching and Researching
Each panelist will deliver a short presentation (titles below), followed by a moderated panel discussion.
Panelists
Jim Sweitzer: Six Scientific Facts about Global Warming and a Question
Mick Tosca: The Effects of Climate Change in Sub-Saharan Africa
Claire Pentecost: Truth or Consequences
Bryant Williams, Chicago's Southeast Environmental Task Force
2:15-2:45 p.m.
Mini-Keynote: Jason McLachan, Associate Professor of Biology, Notre Dame University
Paleo-Ecology and Climate Change (the news from a bottom of a lake)
Break
3:00-4:00 p.m.
Panel 2
Interdisciplinary Frameworks: Representation, Data, and Knowledge(s)
Each panelist will deliver a short presentation (titles below), followed by a moderated panel discussion.
Panelists
Andrew Yang: Nowhere & Now Here: An Exercise in Embodying the Anthropocene
Giovanni Aloi: The New Sublime: Interconnectedness, Meta-sublime, and Representation
Kathryn Schaffer: Seeing and Knowing
Jeremy Bolen: Unresolved Energies
4:00-4:30 p.m.
Mini-Keynote: Julia Adeney Thomas, Associate Professor of History, Notre Dame University
Finding Ecologies of Hope: The Historians' Task in the Age of the Anthropocene
Break
4:45-5:45 p.m.
Panel 3
Art and Activism Now: Resistance/Challenges/Productivities
Each panelist will deliver a short presentation, followed by a moderated panel discussion.
Panelists
Marlena Novak: Envision. Empower. Enact.
Sara Black: 7000 Marks
Tiffany Holmes: Maternal Art Activism: Creative Clean Up
Lindsay French: Practicing Risk: Precarity, Community, and Resistance
5:45-6:30 p.m.
Closing: Parade of banners bound for People's Climate March and the March for Science Chicago
Roundtable:
Olga Bautisa from Chicago's Southeastern Environmental Task Force, will lead students in a discussion about creative activism. Faculty Moderator: Oliver Sann Student Panelists: Maleny Lopez, Miguel Sanchez-Bastida, Shoa Alattas, Falak Vasa, Meredith Eugenie Leich, Joshi Radin
