Please join us for an online screening and discussion series on Climate Crisis and Modernist Praxis, hosted by MSA’s Modernism & Environment Special Interest Group. 

We will meet three times between July and September. In each meeting, we will screen sessions on climate migration and displacement from this past year's UN Climate Summit (COP28) and then discuss how we might bring current climate policy and science into our modernist studies classrooms, scholarship, and other professional activities. Our goal is to think purposefully as a community about what modernist studies can contribute to public debates about climate change, climate migration, and environmental justice.

Session #1: Friday, July 26, 11:30 am ET: 

on “Human Rights Implications of Climate Migration and Forced Displacement”

Session #2: Friday, Aug. 23, 11 am ET: 

on “Refugee Women, Climate Action and the Green Economy” 

Session #3: Friday, Sept. 27, 11 am ET: 

on “Displaced People Taking Action on Loss and Damages”

If you are not a member of either the M&E or MSA listservs already, please email Anne Raine (araine@ottowa.ca) or Molly Volanth Hall (mhall04@risd.edu) to access session Zoom links.

We will screen the COP recordings during the sessions, so there is no need to view them in advance. However, you may use the links above to pre-view the recordings if you like.

The online series will be followed by an in-person workshop, “Climate Crisis and Modernist Praxis: Forms and Methods for Regenerative Futures," at MSA Chicago in November. All are welcome to participate in one or more of the online discussions even if you don’t plan to attend the in-person conference. With participant consent, both the online discussions and the in-person workshop will be recorded and stored for later viewing.

We hope this combination of online and in-person and events will foster conversation between the Chicago conference and the wider community of MSA members who are unable to travel or choose not to fly for environmental reasons. 

Suggested (not required!) supplementary readings:

• Kristy Siegfried/UNHCR, “Climate Change and Displacement: The Myths and the Facts” (2023). https://www.unhcr.org/news/stories/climate-change-and-displacement-myths-and-facts.

• Neel Ahuja, Introduction to Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century (U of North Carolina P, 2021).

• Naomi Klein, “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World” (2016).

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n11/naomi-klein/let-them-drown.

• Hanna Musiol, “On Migration Research, Humanities Education, and Storytelling” (2017). https://blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2017/06/migration.

• Caroline Levine, Preface to The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton UP, 2023).