Spring 2021

Placing the Body

This semester, please join us as we explore bodies as ecologies – constituted by and inseparable from the land, water, creatures, communities, and histories around us. As we move beyond medical conceptions of bodily boundaries, we invite you to examine the forces that have polluted, displaced, disrupted, eluded, and renewed life. Together, we'll focus on the interdependence of life and health – broadly construed – examining relations among bodies, toxins, and lands; climate, race, and displacement; disruptions in our built environment; and what emerges when we listen differently to the world. We invite you to consider how an ecological perspective and attention to place can shift and challenge our understanding of health, the body, and clinical practice in the emerging ecologies where we live and work.

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Embodied Ecologies

Wednesday, February 17, 7:30 - 8:30 PM EST

In the foundational text for our semester, Kimmerer’s “Learning the Grammar of Animacy," she describes how learning her ancestral language of Potawatomi alerted her to the liveliness of the natural world. This piece demonstrates how language shapes our understanding of the boundaries and possibilities between humans and non-humans.
For this first session on "Embodied Ecologies," we'll take up Kimmerer's question, asking how our lives would be different if we recognized the animacy of more than just people. Turning to LaDuke, we'll consider the difficulty of maintaining a healthy home as we read about the embodied, far-ranging consequences of toxic contamination by General Motors and Mohawk efforts to restore an interrupted relationship between the community and the earth. Finally, this talk by LaToya Ruby Frazier highlights work of artists, activists, and inventors to fight environmental racism and restore health in neglected communities.

Loss

Tuesday, March 2, 12 - 1 PM EST

This week's theme is loss. We will be reading work from two scholars who seek to reconcile their collective, generational histories settler-colonial mediated loss with current narratives around climate-driven land loss. In "Indigenous Science (fiction) for the Anthropocene," Kyle Whyte speculates that dystopian themes which permeate climate change erases the "reality of constant change" for Indigenous peoples. Emily Raboteau, on the other hand, urges us to move beyond resilience and embrace the teachings of her Black ancestors - "When something is going to kill you, you run." Finally, we turn to two climate scientists, Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville R. Ellis, who seek to characterize the grief of land loss among Inuit peoples and Australian farmers, respectively. Cunsolo and Ellis question the universality of ecological grief and potential policy implications, but do they heed the warnings set forth by Whyte and Raboteau?
Through these three readings, we hope to forge a path towards justice in the face of inevitable loss.

Structures of Disruption

Tuesday, March 16, 12 - 1 PM EST

In this session, we'll turn our attention to the intersections of senses and surroundings. We aim to understand how exposure to certain experiences of place --in this case, disruptions caused by excesses of light, sound, and heat--have been historically & systemically produced along lines of oppression and exclusion.
We will begin with Simone Browne's "'Everybody's Got a Little Light Under the Sun': Making the Book of Negroes" (if you're pressed for time, we recommend especially focusing on the second section, "Torches, Torture, and Totau: Lantern Laws in New York City" p. 14-21). We will place Browne's work in conversation with two brief articles, one examining the redlining roots of urban heat effects, and another on a specific noise pollution case emerging here in New Haven. These texts, which touch on issues of exclusion, surveillance, containment, and fatigue, illuminate the often obscured structures and regulations that perpetuate these unequal exposures and their harms. What are the costs of these environmental disruptions, and how are they felt within the body? What does resistance or preservation look like under these conditions? Taking up this question of resistance, we'll view the Black Power Naps installation, which attends to the "deliberate fragmentation" of sleep and rest as a specific technique of oppression, developed under slavery and still perpetuated today. The artists Fannie Sosa and Navild Acosta claim "rest as power," and we hope to look to the installation as one possible form of repair or response.

Tidal Forces

Wednesday, March 31, 7:30 - 8:30 PM EST

We'll be reading selections from two recent and exciting works, Alexis Pauline Gumbs' Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals and Tiffany Lethabo King's The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Both of these texts turn to the living world to develop metaphors, methodologies, and ways of being that resist the varied structures and patterns of white supremacy. In her "apprenticeship" to marine mammals, Gumbs describes "the intimacy, the intentional ambiguity about who is who, speaking to whom and when" that provides a way of undoing "the definition of the human, which is so tangled in separation and domination that it is consistently making our lives incompatible with the planet." Echoing this desire for undoing, King writes in The Black Shoals that these strategies, delineated in the text, might begin to "'end this world' and remake reality and its relations on more just terms." As a group, we will take up these two resonant approaches, considering how they help us to know and perhaps to create our world differently.

Black Ecologies

Wednesday, April 14, 7:30 - 8:30 PM EST

Thank you for sticking with us throughout the semester. Each meeting has been beyond excellent and we are excited to introduce our last session, "Black Ecologies," next Wednesday 4/14 at 7:30pm. For this session, we are honored to be joined by PhD candidate Teona Williams, who will be sharing some archival sources and the early stages of a work in progress.
Teona Williams is a doctoral candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. Her work revolves around U.S environmental history, political ecology, race and ethnic studies, environmental justice, digital humanities, and African American history. Her current work explores Black women agrarianism and the struggle for land reparations from the New Deal era to the Black Power Movement. Before Yale, she completed a master’s degree in Environmental Justice at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. There she researched how African American college students navigated the outdoor recreational landscape. In 2017, she won the Clyde Woods Prize for best graduate paper in Black Geographies, for her paper "Build A Wall Around Hyde Park:" Race, Space and Policing on the Southside of Chicago 1950-2010, which was published in The Antipode March 2021.

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