Diversifying Agency
Session Objective: to challenge traditional conceptions of power that undermine the voices of underrepresented stakeholders
Radical Recognition is not simply about superficially noticing nontraditional actors or tokenising marginalised communities. It’s about truly acknowledging and valuing a wide variety of agents. This includes appreciating the power they hold.
Environmental justice and the animal rights movement owe a great deal to critical disability studies, gender studies and queer theory, and critical race theory. These fields have examined, critiqued, and expanded mainstream Western academic ideas about power, capacity, and agency. In class, we spoke about some of the ways future generations, non-human animals, and other underrepresented stakeholders ‘speak’ to us – and how we can better learn to listen.
Review: the Course Slides, reviewing ideas and resources about power, agency, and representation.
Class Slides - 13 October 2021.pdfLearn: about the incredible story of the Florida Highwayman while appreciating the power that water and wind have over us – both emotionally and physically.
Harold Newton was born in 1934 in the Jim Crow South. A talented painter, Newton was one of the founding members of the Florida Highwaymen: a group of primarily self-taught Black artists focused on capturing natural landscapes. In the midst of segregation, shut out of museums and galleries, the group nonetheless managed to make a living with their art.
The art of the Highwaymen (which did include a lone woman, Mary Ann Carroll, whose worked is featured on 21 April) focused on palm trees, alligators, sunsets, and other iconic scenes from Florida’s natural beauty. This work was chosen to accompany today’s look at agency both for the incredible story of the Highwaymen – who painted orange trees when they were instead expected to pick them as exploited labour – and for the way their art captures the power of nature itself.
