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The Apophatic Animal and Literary Representation

Christine Marran's research lies within the disciplinary frame of ecocriticism. Her most recent book, Ecology Without Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) argues that environmental thinking requires a critique of culture. Introducing her concepts of the “biotrope,” "ethnic environmentalism," and “obligatory storytelling,” Marran shows how cultural ideas, which work at a humanistic scale usually toward human interest, can impede our ability to speak about the more-than-human world. Through discussion of texts about industrial modernity, her new materialist approach illustrates how ecocriticism can account for things smaller and greater than a selective humanist “we” only if it takes a critical position on cultural exceptionalism. Marran’s previous book, Poison Woman: Figuring the Transgressive Woman, investigates the powerful icon of the transgressive woman, its shifting meanings, and its influence on defining women’s sexuality and place from its inception in the 1870s. Gender continues to be an important element in her work for understanding the ways in which toxins and other material aspects of industrial culture impact bodies differently. She has also written numerous articles on environmental issues in literary and visual culture.

 

Date:
Location:
Willy T. Young Library Auditorium

What ‘The Anthropocene’ Can Learn from ‘The Animal’

In retrospect, "the question of the animal" seems to have been left in the dust--all too predictably--by the economy of planned obsolescence in academic knowledge production and theory. As Niklas Luhmann pointed out long ago, the autopoiesis of the disciplines depends upon the ceaseless production of novelty. "The Animal" needed to be replaced, as quickly as possible, by Plants, then Plants by Stones, then Stones by the Object more generally, and finally by a more general "materialism" and "realism." Most recently, under the spur of rapid global warming, the discourse of the Anthropocene has become the site upon which all of these elements are reshuffled and reassembled.  This talk will engage Bruno Latour's Facing Gaia in this context, with its admirable desire to assert the "outlaw" character of Gaia as a stay against both holism and humanism. But what the site of "the Animal" shows is Latour's own Actor Network Theory evacuates the radical discontinuity between qualitatively different orders of causation that obtain in living versus physical systems--different orders that are fundamental, of course, to the evolution of the biosphere and the planet.

Cary Wolfe’s most recent projects are Ecological Poetics, or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds (Chicago, forthcoming March, 2020) and a special issue of the journal Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, on “Ontogenesis Beyond Complexity” (forthcoming 2020), focused on the work of the multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional Ontogenetics Process Group. His books and edited collections include Animal Rites: American Culture, The Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago, 2003), the edited collections Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minnesota, 2003) What Is Posthumanism? (Minnesota, 2010), and Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago, 2012). He is founding editor of the series Posthumanities at the University of Minnesota Press and currently holds the Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Chair in English at Rice University, where he is Founding Director of 3CT: The Center for Critical and Cultural Theory.

 

Date:
Location:
Willy T. Young Library Auditorium

Geography Career Night

Learn how a Geography degree becomes a career! Join a panel of alumni and local professionals for a night dedicated to kickstarting your career. This event takes place Wednesday, February 5, 2020 from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM at the Stuckert Career Center. The night includes resume help, professional headshots, and free food.

 

 

Panel

 

Jackie Monge Jackie joined Quantum Spatial, now part of NV5, in 2014. As a Project Manager, she is responsible for total project management including controlling budgets, subcontracting, and providing day-to-day communication with NV5’s geospatial data acquisition and processing teams. Jackie works closely with environmental and natural resource management clients at the federal government level. Some of these clients are the US Geological Survey, US Forest Service, and the US Department of Agriculture. Jackie’s GIS background and LiDAR (light detection and ranging) data expertise plays a critical role in her ability to deliver high-quality solutions to her clients, while also translating their needs into clear technical requirements for NV5 staff across the country and internationally. Before NV5, Jackie earned a master’s degree in Geography from University Kentucky, and a dual bachelor’s degree in Geography and Biology from Florida State University.
Benjamin Mills

I am currently a third-year law student at the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law. Prior to entering law school in 2017, I attended the University of Kentucky from 2015-2017, graduating Summa Cum Laude with a B.A. in Geography, minoring in Mapping and GIS. Before attending UK, I spent two years at the United States Military Academy at West Point (USMA) where my academic studies involved engineering and GIS. Outside of my academic career, I spend my time overseeing the small business I own, Kentucky Koffee Co. I also enjoy woodworking and backpacking. Following law school, I plan to return to Southeastern Kentucky to practice law. 

Chris Doerge

Chris Doerge is the GIS Manager for the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government (LFUCG), where he creates GIS solutions, including software integrations, infrastructure design/maintenance, mapping, and data analysis.  Chris started with the LFUCG GIS Office in April of 2004 and has been involved with projects ranging from generating the 2008 AtLex (the official atlas of Lexington, Kentucky) to integrating GIS data with enterprise asset, 311, and 911 systems.  While proficient in map creation and data analysis, Chris currently focuses on creating solutions and applications that empower users to readily leverage location based information to make data-driven decision.  Chris’s role with the LFUCG has allowed him to work on a wide variety of topics spanning public safety/emergency management, snow removal, waste management, road paving, traffic engineering, planning, parks and recreation, building inspection, code enforcement, and historic preservation.

Laura Greenfield Laura graduated from UK Geography in 2016 with a passion for making maps, research, and analysis for community-oriented projects and non-profits. During her years at UK, she had the opportunity to explore this niche of geospatial work through projects where she partnered with organizations in Lexington to produce accessible analysis and develop tools. Geospatial technology and data visualization are fields that were developed for military and government projects and UK Geography helped Laura realize how these tools can be used instead at the grassroots level. Laura ran her own freelance geospatial business for two years after she graduated, contracting with nonprofits and local governments. Currently, she works with Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, a statewide grassroots social justice organization. With KFTC, she helps manage their database and uses data, research, and analysis to develop tools and resources to inform, educate, and support community organizers. 
Christine Smith Christine Smith is the Executive Director of Seedleaf. Trained academically as a geographer, she has been with Seedleaf since 2017. Her gardening experience is rooted in the sub-tropics of Florida where she grew up on her grandmother’s Kingston garden and menagerie filled with ginep, breadfruit, pomegranates, scotch bonnet peppers, fish, pigeons, chickens and stray dogs. She is most proud of her title as ‘Ambassador of Flowers’. She can be reached at christine@seedleaf.org

 

Date:
Location:
Stuckert Career Center

’The Cow is a Mother, Not An Animal’: Innocence and Animality in Indian Bovine Politics

Radhika Govindrajan is a cultural anthropologist who works across the fields of multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, the anthropology of religion, South Asian Studies, and political anthropology. Her research is motivated by a longstanding interest in understanding how human relationships with nonhumans in South Asia are variously drawn into and shape broader issues of cultural, political, and social relevance: right-wing religious nationalism; elite projects of environmental conservation and animal-rights; everyday ethical action in a time of environmental decline; and people’s struggle for social and political justice in the face of caste discrimination, patriarchal domination, and state violence and neglect. Her book Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018 and by Penguin India in 2019. She has also published articles in the journals American Ethnologist, Comparative Study of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory, and RCC Perspectives.

Date:
Location:
Young Auditorium - Main Library

Dimensions of Political Ecology Keynote Address

Alaka Wali, Curator, North American Anthropology
in the Science and Education Division of The Field Museum

Photo Credit: Erielle Bakkum

Alaka was the founding director of the Center for Cultural Understanding and Change from 1995- 2010.  During that time, she pioneered the development of participatory social science action research and community engagement processes based in museum science to further access of museum resources for excluded communities.  Before joining the Museum, she worked with Dr. Leith Mullings to document the consequences of structural racism on black women’s reproductive and social health in Harlem, N.Y. 

 

Currently, she curates the North American collection, comprised largely of material culture of Native Americans from the late 19th century to the present and works closely with colleagues to implement environmental conservation programs that privilege economic and cultural autonomy for politically marginalized people in both Chicago and the Amazon regions of Peru. Her research focuses on the relationship between art and the capacity for social resilience. Alaka was born in India and maintains strong ties to her birth homeland.

The Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference—or DOPE—is organized and hosted by the Political Ecology Working Group (PEWG). PEWG is an interdisciplinary group of graduate students at the University of Kentucky. Since its inception in 2010, this student-organized conference has become one of the largest, most highly regarded international forums for critical discussions at the intersection of ecology, political economy, and science studies.

 

Date:
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Location:
Gatton Student Center, Worsham Cinema

"Painted in Stone: The Kentucky Mural" Film Screening

This feature documentary explores the racially-charged controversy surrounding a 1930's Works Progress Administration mural at the University of Kentucky. It includes a discussion of public art, censorship, and student activism. Interviews with student activists, artists, an art historian, cultural geographer, and media scholar are punctuated by footage of the 2019 mural protest and images from the occupation of the UK administration building by student protestors. Produced, directed, written, and edited by John Fitch III

 

Date:
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Location:
Memorial Hall Auditorium

Universities and the Legacies of Slavery

Deborah Gray White is the Board of Governors Professor of History and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University.  During her twenty-six years at Rutgers, she has not only been a teacher but the codirector of "The Black Atlantic: Race, Nation and Gender" project at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (1997-99), a research professor at the Rutgers Institute for Research on Women (1999-2000), and chair of the history department (2000-03).

In November 2015, Rutgers University's Chancellor Edwards created the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Populations in Rutgers History and named White as Chair. The Committee traced the university’s early history and its relationship with local African-American and Native-American communities.With active participation from students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, faculty, staff, local historians, and librarians, the committee has conducted painstaking research to reexamine the university’s roots, including locating and studying the wills of Rutgers’ founders and benefactors and other archived documents. The result was the Scarlet and Black Project, which has produced two volumes related to Black and Native people's interaction with the university.

Professor White is the author of Ar'n't I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (Norton, 1985). A second edition, with a new introduction and additional chapter, was issued in 1999. In anticipation of its anniversary, the Southern Historical Association celebrated it at its 2003 conference; and in 2005 a conference entitled "Slave Women's Lives: Twenty Years of 'Ar'n't I A Woman?' and More" was held at the Huntington Institute in California, with the proceedings published in the 2007 Winter issue of the Journal of African American Studies; the papers presented in honor of it at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women were published in the Journal of Women's History in July 2007.

Her other monographs are Let My People Go: African-Americans, 1804-1860 (Oxford UP, 1996) and Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (Norton, 1999). Professor Gray White contributed a number of articles to the Journal of American History, Journal of Caribbean Studies, Journal of Family History, and Journal of African American History. She is also the editor of Telling Histories: Black Women Historian in the Ivory Tower (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and, with Darlene Clark Hine and others, Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (Oxford UP, 2004). She received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Fellowship, the ACLS, the American Association of University Women, and the National Research Council / Ford Foundation.

Selected Publications

  • Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower, ed.  (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2008)
  • Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999)
  • Let My People Go: African American 1800-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
  • Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985, 1999 [2nd ed])

In progress:

“’Can’t We All Just Get Along’: The Cultural Awakenings of the 1990’s” - This book recounts the history of the 1990’s through the lens of the decade’s mass marches and gatherings. The Million Man March, the Million Woman March, the Promise Keepers, the LGBT Marches, and the Million Mom March tell us a lot about sexuality, and the state of American race, class, and gender relations. Separately, and in conversation with each other, they allow for an in-depth analysis of subjects like coalition building, intraracial and interracial faith, marriage and family relationships. In conversation with the past they speak to the continuing processes of millennialism and post-modernism. As such they are powerfully revelatory about American identity (ies) at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Date:
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Location:
Gatton Student Center 330 A&B
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