Due to university closure throughout the rest of the Spring semester, What Can I Do With an ENS Degree? Speaker Series has been cancelled

Winifred Bird is a journalist and translator in northwestern Illinois. Her central interest as a writer lies in nature and our place within it.  She has reported on wildlife, agriculture, nuclear disaster, sea level rise, and many other topics for a wide range of national publications. You can view a few of her favorite projects by clicking on these links.

For close to a decade, she lived in rural Japan, where she divided her time between writing, growing organic rice and vegetables, and absorbing a second culture. She returned to the United States in 2014, and currently lives in a small town on the banks of the beautiful Rock River.

In addition to writing, she works as a Japanese-to-English translator and editor, primarily of academic texts in the humanities and young adult fiction. From 2009 to 2015 she was the translator and English-language editor for japan-architects.com, an online directory of contemporary architects. She frequently writes about architecture and design for Dwell and Interior Design.

Dr. Len Sauers is an Adjunct Professor of Sustainability at Xavier University where he teaches environmental and social sustainability to senior undergraduate and graduate students. Before joining Xavier, he was Vice President of Global Sustainability and Global Product Stewardship at the Procter & Gamble Company (P&G), where he retired in 2016. His primary responsibilities were to develop and execute P&G's global sustainability vision/strategy/goals, ensure its products were safe and in regulatory compliance and lead resolution of technical external relations issues (e.g. questions on environmental quality, chemical safety, animal welfare, etc.). He was P&G's primary contact for environmental and social NGOs. Dr. Sauers has a PhD in Toxicology and is a Diplomate of the American Board of Toxicology. He is currently an independent consultant in the areas of sustainability, product safety and technical external relations.

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.

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.