India's sudden, unprecedented success at the Oscars in 2023 with All that Breathes and The Elephant Whisperers, both documentaries with strong environmental-humanist themes brings to new light the fact that the arts have always been engaged with issues concerning the environment. The South Asian Plenary Roundtable topically focuses on the theme Environmentalism and the Arts broadly, which could include musical cultures, dance, performing arts, film, documentary, as well as literature. Each panelist can focus on and speak to a specific text/tradition and extrapolate on what kind of environmentally-formed historical understanding is possible when the axis is shifted to, say, a marginalized people's or an animal's or a waterbody's history of representation.
Organizer: Anupama Mohan, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur (IITJ)
Time and Location:
TBA
Engaging with topics as diverse as palm oil, taro, and nuclear testing, environmental humanities scholars in the Pacific are drawing together environmental history and more-than-human approaches in new and innovative ways to examine uneven landscape transformations and address the legacies of colonisation. This plenary panel asks how are environmental humanities researchers in the Pacific world engaging with history and with more-than-human approaches? What can these sort of approaches from this region offer to environmental history more generally? Is there a distinctive Pacific approach to environmental history, environmental humanities, and the more-than-human world? It grounds these questions in a series of presentations by researchers about their work.
Organizer: Dr. Emily O'Gorman, Macquarie University
Dr. Sophie Chao, University of Sydney
Time and Location:
TBA
This plenary session will explore four key themes and transitions in Latin America’s environmental past. José Iriarte (University of Exeter, UK) will talk about the region’s deep past, from the arrival of humans over 13,000 years ago until before colonization. He will focus on the nature and scale of pre-Columbian human impact on the Amazon forest, its modern legacy, and the lessons we can learn from past human land use. Since at least two thirds of the region were once covered by forests, José Augusto Pádua (Brazil, Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro) will discuss the historical factors that help to understand the massive deforestation that has occurred since the 1970s, making the fate of the Amazon Forest one of the icons of global environmental concern. Viridiana Hernández (Mexico, University of Iowa) will then focus on one of the causes of deforestation: commercial agriculture, from sugar cane in the seventeenth century to soy today. Finally, Germán Vergara (Mexico, Georgia Tech) will discuss Latin America’s particular energy transition, in which wood and oil are more important than coal. The presenters will show how the region’s unique and diverse environments underline pivotal historical trajectories, which are deeply entangled with developments elsewhere in the world.
Organizer: Sandro Dutra da Silva (Brazil, UniEvangelica)
Claudia Leal (Colombia, Universidad de los Andes)
Time and Location:
TBA
Water is a media that sustains both belief and life. One of its roles is as a symbol of power and destiny. Yet, its broader and functions is represented in the arts and language of human activity.
Using methods of the humanities the panel will shed light on the cultural meanings associated with water’s ecological relationships and identities in Africa’s human geographies. Cultural history approach will allow to untangle culture-specific ways in which local peoples viewed the natural world. This panel considers a view of trickles and floods of water moving to a common destinations, the Mediterranean sea, or southern Africa, or the Atlantic world; and how water appears in both daily and supernatural life in what we might decribe as Africa’s “water cultures.” Those appearances come in the form of fresh water, marine waters, moving streams, stored reservoirs, food habitats, and purveyors of goods and people. The cases presented on this proposed plenary here are examples of these complexities and are harbingers of things to come across global roles of water.
Organizer: James McCann, Boston University
Admire Mseba, University of Southern California
Time and Location:
TBA
