Unraveling the Anthropocene: Race, Environment, and Pandemic

A special episode featuring LAC's April 2022 roundtable event (Co)Figurations of Care: Experience and Infrastructure in the Medical Humanities, featuring Anna Ulrikke Andersen, MK Czerwiec, and Victoria Lupascu. This roundtable discussed care and its multiple and diverse configurations. Care ranges from looking after a patient, to being attuned to the needs of the self and its surroundings, to reorganizing the built medical environment. Our speakers' work reflects on the biopolitical management of health, medical spatial organization, and personal or fictional narratives of care. How do visual art, architecture, and medical technologies can produce, contest, configure and disseminate spatial and embodied forms of knowledge, and call attention to care? (Moderated by Merve Şen) More information on the event & speakers can be found on the LAC website here.

A special episode featuring LAC's March 2022 roundtable event (Co)Figurations of Experience: Ecocritical Approaches to Virtual Worlds, featuring Alenda Y. Chang, Jonathan Correa, Kathryn Hamilton (a.k.a. Sister Sylvester), and Deniz Tortum. This roundtable explored the ecocritical dimensions of digital and virtual environments. Through an interdisciplinary approach to video games, pedagogy, VR, and contemporary art, what possible future(s) are envisioned by and through the experience of virtual worlds? (Moderated by Hannah A. Matangos) More information on the event & speakers can be found on the LAC website here.

In this episode, LAC member Merve Tabur interviews Dr. Gizem Yılmaz Karahan. Dr. Yılmaz Karahan discusses her research on written and visual representations of disease and contagion in the writings of the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi (1611-1682) and in the medical illustrations of an Ottoman surgeon, Şerafeddin Sabuncuğlu (1385-1468). Putting ancient Greek, Arab, and Ottoman Turkish philosophies and scientific discourses in conversation with contemporary discussions on posthumanism and material ecocriticism, Dr. Yılmaz Karahan underlines the significance of historical and cross-cultural analyses in addressing ecological and public health issues today.

LAC member Michelle McGowan interviews Francisco Guevara, a visual artist and curator. Guevara specializes in Levinasian ethics applied to the design of cross-cultural artistic projects as well as the analysis of performativity in contemporary art practices. He has over 20 years of experience designing, curating, managing arts projects, and promoting social change. Guevara is co-founder and Co-Executive Director of Arquetopia, a non-profit foundation and transnational artist residency program promoting development and social transformation through educational, artistic, and cultural programming.

This episode is a recording of the Unraveling the Anthropocene roundtable, our keynote event which was held on March 29 of 2021, in the context of the Comparative literature luncheon speaker series. Merve Tabur (LAC vice president) introduced the speakers and served as moderator. The event gathered over 50 attendees from various departments, who participated in an enriching Q&A session. The Q&A session was not recorded. During the event, speakers shared audiovisual materials with the audience. Visit our website to see some of those materials.

In this episode, LAC member Müge Gedik interviews Berfin Çiçek, a graduate student in Cultural Studies at Sabancı University in Turkey. They discuss Berfin’s project on the revival of trauma and intergenerational memory catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Berfin takes the testimony of a member from the descendent generation of Dersim massacre victims from Turkey, his grandfather, into the focus of her project while exploring how traumatic experiences trigger each other and create an intergenerational memory in general, and more specifically, during the COVID-19 quarantine. Berfin considers testimonials crucial evidence and attributes to established theories, mostly by Cathy Caruth and Dori Laub.

LAC member Michelle McGowan interviews Dr. Rebecca Tarlau, an Assistant Professor of Education and Labor and Employment Relations at The Pennsylvania State University. They discuss Dr. Tarlau’s book Occupying Schools, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education (Oxford, 2019) and the intersections of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra, or MST) with issues of climate justice, COVID-19, and social movements more broadly, including the efforts of the 3/20 Coalition in State College, PA. Dr. Tarlau also compares teacher-led movements in the U.S. and Brazil.

How does antiblackness, slavery, and police power structure society? What has the COVID-19 pandemic revealed about policing? In this episode LAC member Irenae Aigbedion has a provocative conversation with Dr. Tryon Woods (University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth; Providence College) on police violence, police power, and the interrelated systems and inequities that structure society. The two discuss the ways that state and police power has transformed from slavery to the present. Ultimately, they touch on the struggle to consume and process the vast amounts of information presented to us daily via multiple competing channels.

In this episode, LAC member Merve Tabur interviews community organizers Colleen Unroe, Teri Blanton, and Parson Brown. Unroe, Blanton, and Brown share their experiences with various nonviolent direct actions to stop mountaintop removal coal mining. They discuss the significance of documenting the stories of people who are most affected by the abuses of the coal industry. They also reflect on the evolution of community organizing strategies over the years and emphasize the importance of "Just Transition" efforts seeking to build alternative economic development and renewable energy within Central Appalachia.

In this episode, LAC member Merve Tabur has a conversation with Dr. Daniel Finch-Race on the impact of climate change on Venice and the mitigation efforts led by the government, the NGOs, and the local community. Describing life in Venice during the November 2019 flood, Dr. Finch-Race discusses the various coping strategies adopted by the city's inhabitants and comments on how the pandemic has affected pollution levels in Venice. Dr. Finch-Race also examines the similarities and differences between our contemporary affective responses to environmental destruction and representations of environmental issues in late eighteenth-century French and Italian art and literature.

In this episode, LAC member Merve Tabur has a conversation with Dr. Sofia Varino on her "Viral Objects" project which brings together biomedical, ecological, and popular science discourses on the COVID-19 Pandemic. As defined by Dr. Varino, "Viral Objects" are biomedical objects such as masks, vaccines, COVID-19 tests, and Vitamin D supplements that serve a preventative function and invite us to "think ecologically" about the pandemic. Dr. Varino also introduces the "Minor Cosmopolitanisms" framework that informs her scholarship and discusses how issues such as disability rights, environmental justice, and racial justice are central to understanding the different genealogies of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this episode, LAC members Merve Tabur and K'Lah Rose Yamada interview Dr. Karen Keifer-Boyd, Michele Mekel, and Lauren Stetz from the Viral Imaginations: COVID-19 project. Viral Imaginations (#Penn State) is a collaborative art project that consists of an online gallery that aims to curate current and former Pennsylvanians’ creative engagements with the pandemic. The Viral Imaginations team discusses the significance of artistic expression and storytelling in the face of ecological destruction, racial injustice, and public health crises. The team also introduces the publicly available lesson plans (K-12) that incorporate submissions from the Viral Imaginations project into classroom discussions.

LAC member Camila Gutiérrez interviews working artist, teacher, and researcher Melissa Leaym-Fernandez.  Leaym-Fernandez has worked in a variety of creative learning spaces that include rural towns, urban cities, and sites with environmental toxins, including with the lead-poisoned in Flint, Michigan, and many other students who are intimidated to develop creative skills but need them in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Her professional practice includes using artmaking to teach people how to express their personal voice, share feelings, and support their community through artistic skills in a non-threatening but challenging manner.

In Episode 14, “‘All the Way to Hell’: Mineral Rights Between Art and Activism,” Hannah Matangos and Merve Tabur interview visual artist and activist Eliza Evans. Evans introduces her activist-art project “All the Way to Hell,” which aims to draw attention to fossil fuel development on private land in the U.S. by giving away mineral rights to participants. In addition to discussing the purpose and reception of the project, Evans, Hannah, and Merve also have a conversation about the history and legal aspects of mineral rights in Oklahoma.

What does performance and protest look like in a time of pandemic? How do we study live performance at a moment when keeping our distance is the safest way to keep safe? When do we as researchers stop observing and put our bodies on the line in solidarity with protest movements? In this episode, Irenae Aigbedion (LAC) and Camila Gutiérrez (LAC) interview Dr. Elizabeth Gray (Penn State) on her current and future work on art and activism in Latin America. We focus on her book project, The Poetics of Intervention: Art and Activism in Contemporary Latin America, visiting Chile, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina through Dr. Gray’s stories and reflections on the transformative art and publishing practices that have emerged in these countries. Our conversation shifts to an exploration of the beginnings of her second project, an analysis of Mapuche activism and the battle for land rights in Chile. Together, we open up a larger discussion of social movements—in particular student led movements—that have fundamentally reshaped the country.

When we talk about the things that define us--the things that make us who we are--, what do we show the world, and what do we keep to ourselves? How is art a tool that we can use to bridge gaps in providing care in medical treatments? These seemingly separate questions come together in this episode, as Irenae Aigbedion (LAC) and Mark Stephens (Penn State College of Medicine) discuss identity dissonance, the value of art in medicine, and discovering the self through the art of mask making. As they discuss the transformative power of mask making in the context of identity formation and medical practice and treatment, the two think through the ways that art can engage with the triple crisis of racial violence, ecological disaster, and global pandemic.

In this episode, LAC members Müge Gedik and Camila Gutiérrez interview Dr. Eduardo Mendieta (Penn State, UP) about his project on the anthropocentric COVID-19 virus in terms of an apparatus of pandemic governmentality in the Anthropocene as well as the role of colonialism and slavery in the production of the Anthropocene, including European colonialism that initiated a process of extraction of resources and bodies that lead to the destruction of indigenous peoples and ecosystems. Topics include how globalization, mega urbanization, mass transportation and tourism, vectors of contagion enable the global spread of viruses in the epoch of the Anthropocene today, in which globalized humans become the facilitator of a global pandemic such as that of COVID-19. We discuss how neoliberal politics of extraction change the metabolism of the earth through changes in the seas, the atmosphere, and on the land; and the detrimental consequences of the climate crisis and the following politics of death on black, indigenous, Latinx, and people of color. The discussion continues on how the politics of death that follow European colonialism and modernity emerge out of the genocide of indigenous peoples, Native American peoples, and the slave trade. We explore the relationship of causality between colonization, globalization, and the exchange of viruses and bacteria that occurred in this process, and the correlation between microparasites (virus, bacteria) and macroparasites (kings, autocratic governors).

In this episode, Merve Tabur (LAC) interviews Gidon Bromberg, Nada Majdalani, and Yana Abu Taleb, co-directors of EcoPeace Middle East. Gidon, Nada, and Yana introduce the environmental peacebuilding and conflict resolution strategies employed by EcoPeace Middle East in addressing transboundary water justice issues in the Jordanian-Palestinian-Israeli contexts. Co-directors of EcoPeace Middle East and Merve have a conversation about the significance of youth education programs like the "Good Water Neighbors" project in raising awareness on environmental issues and promoting peace in the region.

In this episode, Irenae Aigbedion (LAC) welcomes Dr. Jamie Lee Andreson (Penn State) to the series to discuss the latter's project, "Candomblé Temples in the Fight against Religious and Environmental Racism in Brazil." Through her personal stories and case studies, Dr. Andreson takes us to the main site of her work: Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, where a fierce battle for religious freedom and antiracism is taking place. She examines the threats that candomblé temples face today and unpacks that ways that colonial history, contemporary global politics, and the ever present tension of the COVID-19 pandemic have complicated and even prevented their religious practices. Dr. Andreson shares the ways that temples themselves are nonetheless fighting back against oppression and mobilizing for their freedom to practice and their right to exist.

LAC member Hannah Matangos interviews Kristin Jacobson, Professor of American Literature, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey.  Jacobson researches what she terms “adrenaline narratives,” or perilous adventure stories. She and Hannah have a conversation about the ways race, gender, the pandemic, and the climate crisis converge in the American adrenaline narrative.