ASCA Political Ecologies Workshop announces: Masterclass and Public Lecture with Dr. Cymene Howe (Rice University)

Public Lecture: Friday, March 6th @ 17:00-19:00 (Location PCH 1.05)

The masterclass on March 6th from 10-12 will be in PCH 5.08

Melt, Rise and Hydrological Globalization – An Origin Story 

Around the globe glaciers and ice sheets are losing their mass, oceanic thermal expansion continues and populations are seeing landscapes denuded of ice while others are becoming flooded by seawater. Rapidly transforming cryo- and hydrospheres promise misery to millions. But these elemental state-shifts are also locations of material connectivity where places and people are becoming linked through their water. In this presentation, I juxtapose the loss of Icelandic glaciers with rising seas in lower latitude coastal cities impacted by Arctic melt. A theoretical proposition that I call “hydrological globalization” forms the analytic infrastructure for the presentation and highlights a new NASA model that determines which glacial basins are contributing to sea level rise in the world’s coastal cities. I close with reflections on my recent public-facing work to memorialize the first major Icelandic glacier to be lost to climate change, Okjökull.

Cymene Howe is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rice University and author of Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press) and Intimate Activism: The Struggle for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua, also at Duke University Press. Ecologics is one half of the duograph Wind and Power in the Anthropocene; Engergopolitics, by Dominic Boyer, is the other half.

https://anthropology.rice.edu/cymene-howe

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Masterclass: Friday, March 6th @ 10:00-12:00 (Location PCH 5.08) (1 EC)

Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene

For the masterclass, Dr. Howe will discuss political ecologies in conversation with her recent book, Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke UP). Students can access the book as open access (PDF download) here:  https://doi.org/10.25611/j5kf-mr18

Participants should read 1) the introduction, 2) the chapter on “wind,” and 3) Cristián Simonetti and Tim Ingold’s “Ice and Concrete: Solid Fluids of Environmental Change,” Journal of Contemporary Anthropology 5.1 (2018).

All interested in participating should email ASCA Political Ecologies Workshop organizers in advance:

Jeff Diamanti j.diamanti@uva.nl
Joost de Bloois: J.G.C.deBloois@uva.nl

Creative Writing Workshop by Jane Lewty

17 or 21 January 2020

Locations:

17 January 2020 | OMHP, Oudemanhuispoort, Amsterdam, room C 0.23
21 January 2020 | PCHoofthuis, Spuistraat 134, Amsterdam,  room 5.59

In this day-long workshop, participants will examine texts that interact with the creative process in a variety of ways, as models and prompts for our own narratives. What happens to prose writing when we engage with other constructions of language? What kinds of actions might be foregrounded, complicated, or transformed? How do we write something new?

The event will be divided into two sections; the first will take the form of a short lecture on current trends, patterns and concerns of creative writing practices. Focus will be given to hybridity as form, by expanding our definitions of “crossing genres” and questioning the binary of the poetry / prose definition. Then, we will look at contemporary writers whose work subverts narrative practice, and who have embarked on collaborative acts across mediums with artists, dancers, scientists, architects and musicians. Through short creative writing experiments, participants will investigate the ways in which sound and image can interrupt, complicate, and layer a text, as well as the reasons a writer might embrace this multimodal, multivocal form.

The second section will focus on the craft of writing. Participants will learn contemplative practices that ground mind and body in active attention, invite curiosity, and prompt new directions for their ongoing academic work. Part of writing creatively is to be aware of a space that is equally open to possibility and failure; in our explorations, we will see that “failure” can also be innovative. We will take chances with form that may bring surprise and insight, and build a space for writing in which original compositions are able to appear. At the end of the session, participants will have produced a short creative manuscript that both reflects their immediate embodied experience, and is in some way responsive to the texts we have consulted throughout the day. All disciplines are welcome, since the objective of this writing workshop is to see how genres can merge and perform alongside one another.

This workshop will be of interest to current PhD students who not only wish to investigate the correlation[s] between creative and critical writing, but also want to expand their knowledge of cross-genre work. Students undertaking the rMA at NICA and OSL will similarly be energized by writing exercises and research strategies that may compliment their existing practice. They may earn one or two credits for their involvement.

Registration contact: Eloe Kingma at nica-fgw@uva.nl. Please mention your affiliation.

Jane Lewty is the author of two collections of poetry: Bravura Cool ( 1913 Press: 2013), winner of the 1913 First Book Prize in 2011, and In One Form To Find Another (Cleveland State University Press: 2017) winner of the 2016 CSU Open Book Prize. She has also co-edited two volumes of essays: Broadcasting Modernism (University Press of Florida, 2010) and Pornotopias: Image, Desire, Apocalypse (Litteraria Pragensia, 2009). She is currently collaborating with the Dutch artist Jennifer Tee in a series of multilingual performance pieces on ecology. At present, she teaches History of Art at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and she has held faculty positions at universities in the UK, USA and The Netherlands