LIMEat the Environment, Culture, and Society Cluster | Northwestern University
2024 Symposium
(At)tension
Embracing Indeterminacy through Observation, Attunement,
and other Embodied Knowledge-Making under the Climate Crisis
About Lime
Lime is the born-digital journal of Northwestern University’s Environment, Culture, and Society Cluster, convened by graduate students dedicated to querying and transgressing the boundaries of the Environmental Humanities. The journal fosters emergent conversations, methods, and mediums on nature, climate, and the environment. Its title embodies two structures of feeling in the Anthropocene: first, Lime references the limestone seawall that sculpts Northwestern’s lakefill, pointing to legacies of extractive and interventional relationships to land. Second, Lime calls community to gather and celebrate better futures through the Caribbean definition of the word, an informal gathering or party. Clear-eyed to the on-going struggle and open to the joys of
co-creation, Lime invites proposals from scholars, activists, artists, and practitioners of all backgrounds.
Northwestern
University
Lime at the Environment, Culture, and Society Cluster
Climate Crisis and Media Arts Buffett Institute for Global Affairs
Symposium program
17 May, 2024
Seminar Room, Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities
Northwestern University
10:00-10:30am
Opening remarks
10:30am-12:00pm
Panel 1: Waste, Wetlands, Will, and What is Lost
Kat Caribeaux (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art History, Northwestern University)
Lauren Baker (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University)
Ethnography of the invisible: How to pay attention
to waste that is not there
Phillip Campanile (Visiting Instructional Professor
of Geography, Mount Holyoke College)
A Natural History of Destruction: Attuning to the Spectral Wetlands of the Great Lakes
Jerald Lim (Ph.D. Student/Instructor, Environmental Humanities Program, University of Utah)
The death of subjective agency
and its ethical implications
12:00-1:30pm
Lunch and Film Discussion
Erik Nuding (Documentary Media MFA,
Northwestern University)
Sasha Tycko (Department of Anthropology,
Emory University)
Observing the Atlanta Forest: Toward an Aesthetic
of Reality Against an Aesthetic of War
1:30-3:00pm
Panel 2: Flows of Meaning - Reading Ecologies
Kayla Boyden (Ph.D. Student, Department of English, Northwestern University)
Flesh and the Limits of Man in Toni Morrison's Jazz
Janie Crawford, Esch Batiste and the Queer Dimensions of Hurricane Floodwaters in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Salvage the Bones
Tyler Lutz (Ph.D. Student, Department of English, University of Chicago)
Reading on the Line: Moby Dick
and the Whale Watching
3:15-3:45 pm
4:00-4:30pm
4:30-4:45pm
Closing remarks
Jacob Smith (Department of Radio/Television/Film, Northwestern University)
Speakers
Samantha L. Adams is a Doctoral Candidate in English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where she is will be the 2024-2025
James A. Winn Graduate Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities. Her research lies at the intersections between African American Literature, Ecocriticism, Black Feminisms, and Black Studies. Her dissertation studies the literary and historical relationships between Black subjects and bodies of water beyond the Atlantic Ocean.
Kayla Boyden is currently a PhD student in the English Department at Northwestern University. Her research explores Black contemporary poetry and poetics, Black feminist thought, and critical theory. Currently, Kayla is a Poetry and Poetics Mellon Cluster Fellow.
Phillip is an urban political ecologist with a foundation in human geography and the environmental humanities. His work engages postindustrial landscape as text, endowing historical remnant with meaning and inherited meaning with history. After the author, W.G. Sebald, he offers a “natural history of destruction” in both theory and method.
In this, “destruction” becomes a marker of contingent political-ecological transformation. This approach is meant to delimit the explanatory power of ecology, where “disturbance” has been ontologized as the driver of adaptation in social systems. By contrasting destruction and disturbance, Phillip embraces the findings of ecology while criticizing the broader application of ecological temporalities in imperial and settler-colonial scenes. Phillip currently studies the climate-induced hydrological transformations afoot across the Great Lakes and the response made to them by Rust Belt cities. He accounts for
the production of settler capitalist infrastructures and their reproduction under the guise of coastal resilience planning.
T. J. Demos (UC Santa Cruz)
T. J. Demos is the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture,
at University of California, SantaCruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies.
Demos is the author of several books, including Against the Anthropocene: VisualCulture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art
and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics
of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013) – winner of the College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award – and Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2013). He recently co-edited
The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art,Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021),
was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-21). Demos was Chair and Chief Curator of the Climate Collective, providing public programming related
to the 2021 Climate Emergency > Emergence program at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Maat) in Lisbon. His new book, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come, 2023, is now out from Sternberg Press.
As a environmental humanities graduate student, my research and creative interests revolve around ecological ways of being, as informed by posthumanism and daoism,
as well as its cultivation via entertainment media and play.
Tyler is finishing his second year in the English PhD program at the University of Chicago, where he studies conceptions of environmental and cosmic totality during
the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His current projects endeavour to read empty space: the visual lacunae of British colonial maps and the logical aporia required by Goedel’s theorem, as taken up in science fiction. Tyler completed an AB in English language and literature at the University of Chicago and a PhD in soft condensed matter physics at Yale University. He received a graduate certificate from and served
on the steering committee of Yale’s Environmental Humanities Initiative and maintains
a longstanding interest in probing the porous interface between cultural production
and the natural world.
Claire Pentecost (Watershed Art & Ecology,
the Department of Photography, SAIC)
Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer who researches the living matters of the unified multi-dimensional being that animates our planet. Pentecost’s work is driven by research and inspired by questions of form. Pentecost has exhibited work at dOCUMENTA (13); 13th Istanbul Biennial; White Chapel Gallery; MCA Chicago; Times Museum (Guangzhou); Higher Pictures Generation (NYC), and others. She is a founding member of Deep Time Chicago, a collective exploring cultural change in response to ecological crisis, and the Anthropocene Commons, an international research network. With Brian Holmes she directs Watershed Art&Ecology, an experimental cultural space in Chicago.
Committee Members
Kat Caribeaux (Department of Art History, Northwestern University)
M Romanova (Department of Comparative Literature, Northwestern University)
Sarah Nisenson (Department of English, Northwestern University)
Phoenix Gonzalez (Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama, Northwestern University)
Kang Kang (Department of Comparative Literature, Northwestern University)
Jooyoung Cho (Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama, Northwestern University)
Klaudia Cierluk (Department of Comparative Literature, Northwestern University)
Faculty Advisors
Jacob Smith (Department of Communication, Radio/Television/Film, Northwestern University)
Keith Mako Woodhouse (Department of History, Northwestern University)
Michael Metzger (Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University)