Abstracts of Papers
Session 1, Panel 1: Art and the Environment
Sarah (Soah) Blake, "Earth Hum" (Histories of Art and Climate Crisis)
“Earth Hum” is dedicated to Rachel Martin’s Family Tree, a drawing that combines art, earth, and love all into one. In a conversation with Martin, we learn a little bit more about her art told through her own voice and drawings as well as the ethereal presence of friends and old Super 8 footage. Like Martin says, in art, you see that there are magical things happening but it is really very human.
Egypt Amparo, Brandol Jorge, Gabriel Mboutou, Jose Gomez, and Tameria Romeo
Readings from Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta's environmental creative writing course (Introduction to Creative Writing)
Emma Jayne Smith, "The Existential Crisis Song" (Care Work and Climate Adaptation)
This is a song from a one-act musical about the emotional experience of climate change. It contains themes of obsession with productivity, existential dread, and the need to make a difference.
Moderator: Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta (English, Creative Writing)
BWCC Room A
Session 1, Panel 2: Migrations
Kinza Siddiqui and Gabriella Nanna, "Literary and Scientific Origins of Invasive Species as seen at Teatown Reservation" (Gothic Decay)
In this paper, we are exploring the concept of invasive species, as well as the origins of specific invasive species found at Teatown Reservation in Ossining, NY. Additionally, we are evaluating the charged language behind the term 'invasive', and connecting it to the relevant Indigenous history of Teatown.
Jenna Abu-Hassan, "Indigenous Land Ethics of Palestine and the Myth of “Making the Desert Bloom”" (Environmental Ethics as Liberatory Theory and Practice)
For my conference project in Environmental Ethics as Liberatory Theory and Practice, I will be studying the environmental ethics of the Zionist mission in the colonization of Palestine and its opposition to the indigenous Palestinian land ethics. I am interested in debunking some of the myths that have been perpetuated by Zionist authorities about their cultivation of the land, specifically the myth of “making the desert bloom”.
Freya Benson, Mikkie Garcia, Freddie Sugiyama, "Alternative Burial Practices" (Gothic Decay)
This paper will address how Western society views death, and how contemporary Western burial practices are often harmful for the environment. Natural burial, also known as green burial, will be presented as a environmentally-friendly alternative to standard burial practices.
Emily Orr, Ishika Joshi, and Leia Pfeffer, "The Mystery/Miracle of Eels" (Gothic Decay)
This paper and website is a research project that highlights and analyses the complexities of eels from a cultural and biological perspective. Ancient writings on eels that claim their existence as "spontaneously generated", indigenous folktales about eels, and the gaps present in our scientific understanding of the behaviour of the eel today are presented through the format of writing and visuals. In relaying the unanswered questions and highlighting the ways in which eels have been perceived throughout history, this project aims to provide insight and awareness on the eel as a biologically diverse and essential aspect of culture, literature, and aquatic ecosystems.
Moderator: Heather Cleary (Spanish, Literature)
BWCC Room C
Session 2, Panel 3: Indigeneity and Climate Justice
Charlotte Reynolds, "Sharing Indigenous Knowledge: Food Sovereignty, Respect, and Colonization" (Care Work and Climate Adaptation)
My paper explores the question of how to keep Indigenous knowledge sacred while sharing it with others, specifically regarding Indigenous relationships with the land and agriculture. Does sharing Indigenous Knowledge beyond the community colonize the knowledge? What are the community perspectives on this question? What are the scientific implications?
Naomi Dix, "City, Land Art, and Indigeneity: “The Cure for Capitalism"" (Histories of Art and Climate Crisis)
As an unprecedented achievement in modern land art, Heizer’s City is an artist’s attempt to depict humanity’s relationships to the land through the tradition of earthworks, such as using a remote site in the American Southwest as an attempt to diverge from capitalism and the gallery system. In this manner, Heizer approached City from an archeological perspective, using traits from Indigenous architecture and designing City to last beyond the modern age. However, Heizer’s attempt to replicate Indigenous tradition while dismissing the history of City’s site appropriates Indigenous culture and raises ethical questions about stolen land, underlining the problematic nature of the land art movement.
Kate Romanik, "Ephemera and Ritual: How Cecilia Vicuña's Art Weaves Together Indigenous Practice and Climate Justice" (Histories of Art and Climate Crisis)
Cecilia Vicuña revitalizes her ancestral Andean cultural practices to challenge temporal concepts and explore alternative forms of communication between the human and non-human world. She confronts the interconnected struggles of climate crisis with the bodily oppression of women and Indigenous communities through ephemerality and ritual in her textile-based work.
Emily Rouder and Leah Goodall, "The Bronx River: Indigenous History and Modern Problems" (Gothic Decay)
The Bronx River has been a central part of southern NY's landscape for centuries, as it is the only freshwater river in NYC and runs through 13 Westchester municipalities, into the heart of the Bronx, and eventually ends as a tributary to the East River. Its location has made it vulnerable to increasing urbanization, and especially pollution from runoff that can no longer be absorbed by the floodplain. Despite its long and tangled history of human intervention, the Bronx River still stands as an important ecological asset; its waters and banks support biodiverse life including fish, benthic invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals; and within its watershed are some wetlands and forested areas. Work to improve water quality and biodiversity within the river is well underway. Part of this effort is recognizing the historic conditions of the river: the state it was in when first human contact occurred. Central to understanding the river is understanding this indigenous history. Presenting on both the modern and historic conditions of the river gives us a fuller understanding of the challenges we face today, and the solutions needed to overcome them.
Moderator: Izzy Lockhart (Literature, Indigenous Studies)
BWCC Room A
Session 2, Panel 4: Water
Isaiah Aguilar, Gabrielle Kriger, and Jenna Abu-Hassan, "The value of a wetland: a literary and scientific perspective" (Gothic Decay)
This project fuses literary analysis and fieldwork at the Center for the Urban River at Beczak (CURB) marsh to examine the cultural and ecological value of a marsh. We survey the evolving perspectives on wetlands in the American literary imagination, ranging from the colonial period through the present. Through our fieldwork, we explore the positive and ecological benefits of a wetland, a corroborating perspective that our literary analysis exemplifies for contemporary history.
Juliana Worden, "Polluted: The Plastic Affect" (Histories of Art and Climate Crisis)
My paper centers around water pollution in several different facets. The main focus, however, is on plastic. I look at this issue in an artistic format using Alejandro Duran’s “Washed-Up” photo series.
Sophie Teachout, "Vernal Pools: The Intersection of Movement Practice and Environmental Consciousness" (Care Work and Climate Adaptation)
'Vernal Pools' is a series of movement workshops developed by myself as a part of my research at the intersection of movement practice and environmental consciousness. These workshops focus on developing nuanced relationships between the moving body and the more-than-human elements of the natural environment, engaging with ideas of sensitivity, self-efficacy, and destabilization. In the context of the SLICE Symposium, I would lead audience through a short, 5 minute movement practice that focuses on increasing sensitivity to surroundings as well as investigating sites of potential energy inside and outside of the body. Then I would discuss how this practice aligns with the theory I developed in my research.
Issy Kagan, Vetaal Upadhyaya, and Olivia Keefe, "Humans in the Marsh: An literary analysis of eco-fiction novels" (Gothic Decay)
Our paper researches the relationships between humans and wetland ecosystems through literary analysis of eco-fiction novels and research on the biological history of marshes. Our literary analysis will specifically focus on wetlands in North Carolina, Eastern India, and Florida.
Moderator: Michelle Hersh (Biology)
BWCC Room B
Session 2, Panel 5: Relationality
Joey Severson, Marcella Cincotta, Marin Hanna, "Measuring Specific Intelligence" (Gothic Decay)
Jessie Taveras and Darwin Monegro, "The Effects of Climate Change on Women in Africa" (Environmental History of Africa)
Joey Severson, "Impressionable Landscape: Touching with Ideas, Not Fingers" (Environmental Ethics as Liberatory Theory and Practice)
I analyze the a brief history of landscape and the processes through which connotations are applied to landscapes. I explore the categorization of spaces into "contaminated" and "clean" as well as the human relation to those spaces. The medium of the project as well as the content concerns the place of narrative in remediation efforts and as a potential point of reconnection to a contaminated home.
Isabela De Jesus-Forero "Sun and Sea; Is leisure even relaxing anymore?" (Histories of Art and Climate Crisis)
This paper discusses leisure as an end goal in the anthropocene under capitalism and how leisure is detrimental to the world as well as the people in it. Leisure, in its evolved, modern form of overconsumption is left only to the people who can afford it, and those who cannot work even harder and put off opportunities of leisure to reach the point where they do not have to worry about work while they relax (which is often unfruitful). Without a network of care between people, the Earth is put at risk. Through ecotourism, neocolonialism, environmental racism and more, is leisure even relaxing anymore?
Moderator: Sarah Hamill (Art History)
BWCC Room C
Session 3, Panel 6: Death and Healing
Lukas Gates, "Environmental Ontology: The Self as Being in Relation" (Environmental Ethics as Liberatory Practice)
This paper is an exploration of ontology as informed by environmental ethics. Through the musing of biology and the truths of indigenous modes of being, I demonstrate how we may conceptualize the self as relational. Rather than view ourselves as wholly separate from the world, humans may begin to shift our perspective to recognize and appreciate our place in it.
Raquel da Silva, Evan Chiang, and Maya Blackmon, "Cultural Burial Practices and Ecological Health" (Gothic Decay)
Across religions and world-views, burial practices vary based on belief and have different implications on ecological health. Throughout this paper, the burial practices of the Abrahamic religions, Tibetan Buddhism and Animism are individually explored with the initial goal of comparing and contrasting the ecological impacts that accompany different death practices.
Emilie Stastny-Sulke and Emma Chally, "Death under Glass: The Legacy of Preservation in Grimms' Fairytales" (Gothic Decay)
This paper explores the preservation of women as seen in the Grimm Brothers’ fairytales and their real world parallels. Our focus rests on themes of bodily autonomy and the idolisation of beauty past the grave, as well as the attitudes towards the science of preservation in the 1800s and beyond.
Holly Gregory, "Our Accumulation Addiction: The Harm of Consumerism and Rehabilitation Treatments for Our Minds and the Environment" (Environmental Ethics: Liberatory Theory and Practice)
In the same way an addict rationalizes using their substance, environmental degradation has been framed as an unfortunate side effect of our inevitable progress towards a predetermined future. These tendencies are justified using a constructed narrative built on cultural techniques and global systems of oppression, conditioning our minds to be in a constant state of desire. By framing consumerism as an addiction, this analysis questions the source of our unbridled dysregulated desire, investigates potential harm reduction addiction interventions and applies them on a global scale as a treatment for our consumption craving. This path away from consumption dependency engages our fear of scarcity, the difficulties of living simply, and a critical long-term approach to pleasure in an attempt to imagine a future in which we consciously rehabilitate our relationship with the environment by healing our bodies and minds.
Moderator: Melissa Frazier (Russian, Literature)
BWCC Room A
Session 3, Panel 7: Food and Nurturing
Leia Pfeffer, "Folk Music, Activism, Care Work" (Care Work, Climate Adaptation, and the Settler Colony)
My paper is about the role that folk music plays in various political/social movements! For this presentation I will focus on the Brookside mine strike in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1973.
Stella Lindbergh and Abby Dixon, "Sacred Trees: The Science and Myth Behind the Motif" (Gothic Decay)
We are exploring the motif of the Sacred Tree/Tree of Life across three cultures through their creation myths, worshipping practices, and the scientific makeup and ecosystem services of the species they recognize in their culture as a sacred tree.
Juliana Ciccone, "The Sacrifice" (Care Work and Climate Adaptation)
A shot story about a couple who lives on a ranch in Northern California and only eat watermelons, which they grow themselves. They fear that any other form of consumption under capitalism is unethical, especially as it is detrimental to the environment.
Emma McKibben, "Cookbook of Care" (Care Work and Climate Adaptation)
I am creating two zines on food aid in America. I am addressing the question: how to decolonize the food system? My first zine is on food aid history, what is food justice, and how climate change is central to the food system. The second zine is a "Cookbook of Care" that gives example of local organizations and food justice movements, action items, and overall food care.
Moderator: Eric Leveau (French, Literature)
BWCC Room B
Session 3, Panel 8: Justice and Activism
Bryce Carl “A comparative analysis of parasitism in science fiction" (Gothic Decay)
This presents will be looking at two pieces of science fiction that contain parasites, The Last of Us and Alien and comparing them to each other. It will also be examining the parasites at a basic biological level and the ties these pieces of media have to the political climate that surrounded them at their releases.
Cassandra Holcomb, "Love is the Message, the Message is Death: Visualizing Anti-Blackness as Total Climate" (Histories of Art and Climate Crisis)
"What would America be like if white people loved black people as much as they love black culture?" This is the question posed by Arthur Jafa's seven-minute film, Love is the Message, The Message is Death, released in 2016. The film explores and scrutinizes representations of Black people in American media through a collection of original and found footage. Jafa's video highlights the nuances of the Black experience and implores the audience to examine the beauty and sorrow of Black people and culture.The film reveals how deeply ingrained white supremacist ideologies are in American society and presents the concept of "anti-Blackness as total climate."
Demi Chowen, "Undoing Linear Time: Indigenous Kinship Narratives in Climate Activism" (Environmental Ethics as Liberatory Theory and Practice)
As Kyle Whyte concludes in "Time as Kinship", narrating climate change through linear time is ineffective, as it imposes a peril-inducing mindset which sets individuals working not for their immediate community but against a distant climate apocalypse. Instead, communities must seek to narrate climate change through relations between kin of all species. Narratives about community relations, especially kinship narratives from Anishinaabe communities, initiate this shift in perspective, allowing climate change to feel personal and actionable.
Vivian Marko, Sydney Walter, and Mikaela Pacheco-Berger, "Examinations the Human Conception and Projection of Care onto Birds in the Literary and Scientific Sphere" (Gothic Decay)
Is there a way of balancing an act which gives people joy and caring for wildlife? Can we care for wildlife with our human-centric conceptions of care? How humans conceive of animals as things to be cared for, increases the likelihood of avian protection, yet can decline the living conditions of birds and can do harm. We will examine this concept through literary work such as Emily Dickinson’s poems, and scientific studies such as The Scarlet Experiment by Jeff Karnicky.
Moderator: Sarah DiMaggio (Philosophy)
BWCC Room C