Celina Osuna
Bio
Born in El Paso, Texas and arrived at ASU to do her PhD in Literature. It was while living in Glasgow that she discovered her interest in Desert Literature. At ASU, she has embraced and conducted interdisciplinary research projects pertaining to thinking through and with the desert.
Research interests
American Literature of the long 20th Century, Native American Literature, Desert Humanities, and Studies of: Place, Memory, Time, and Light.
Interests in Turrell
His trajectory from projecting artificial light in enclosed spaces in the late 60s to working with natural light in outdoor and open spaces in the decades since.
The perceptual and affective experiences of Ganzfelds and Skyspaces.
Slow thought, slow experience, and geological time.
For this class
My main focus is on the roles played by atmosphere, heat, cold, light, horizon, and vastness of the desert while co-creating with the artist and viewers.
My questions include:
- How does incorporating the sights and sounds of the celestial and terrestrial cause us to feel and think differently in the anthropocene?
- What can shared experiences of places like Roden Crater do for our transdisciplinary understandings and undertakings of art, geography, engineering, architecture, and sustainability?
- How does the immanence of such conditions and embodied experiences resist representation and language?
- Ultimately, how might one begin to bring a written critical and cultural context, or even a digestible access point, for others?
Field Lab Student Showcase Banner:
osuna_rodenCrater_poster_FINAL.pdf
End of Semester Presentation:
Bibliography
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome., et al. Prismatic Ecology : Ecotheory beyond Green. 2013.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment : Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill.
Routledge, 2011.
Jabès, Edmond, and Marcel Cohen. From the Desert to the Book. Barrytown, NY, Station
Hill, 1990.
Lingis, Alphonso. The Imperative. Indiana University Press, 1998.
Massey, Doreen B. For Space. SAGE, 2005.
McCormack, Derek P. “Remotely Sensing Affective Afterlives: The Spectral Geographies of
Material Remains.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 100, no. 3,
2010, pp. 640–654.
“Place” --- The Dictionary of Human Geography, Blackwell, Malden, MA, 2009.
“Scale” --- The Dictionary of Human Geography, Blackwell, Malden, MA, 2009.
“Space” --- The Dictionary of Human Geography, Blackwell, Malden, MA, 2009.
Stengers, Isabelle. ‘Gaia, The Urgency to Think (and Feel)‘, presented at Os Mil Nomes de
Gaia: do Antropoceno a Idade da Terra. 2015.
Sullivan, Heather I. I. “The Ecology of Colors: Goethe’s Materialist Optics and Ecological
Posthumanism.” Material Ecocriticism, Indiana University Press, 2014, pp. 80–94.
Thrift, Nigel. “Summoning Life.” Envisioning Human Geographies, Taylor and Francis, 2014, pp.
81–103.
