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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Qatar:20220413T180000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Qatar:20220413T193000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015034
CREATED:20220421T084058Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230806T071749Z
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SUMMARY:Global Perspectives on Slavery and Freedom on Film
DESCRIPTION:The Webinar was a concluding panel discussion for our Cinematic Afterlives film series and aimed to discuss the stakes and challenges of portraying slavery and abolition through film from different perspectives and geographic contexts. \n\nSpeakers: Alyssa Sepinwall (California State University San Marcos)\, Dexter Gabriel (University of Connecticut)\, Parisa Vaziri (Cornell University) \, and Firat Oruc (Georgetown University in Qatar)Moderator: Trish Kahle (Georgetown University in Qatar) \n\n\n\n\n\nThis event is part of Cinematic Afterlives: Film and Memory in the Black Atlantic research project.
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/global-perspectives-on-slavery-and-freedom-on-film/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:Panels,Race & Society
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2022/04/April-13-feature-1.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20220330T180000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20220330T203000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015034
CREATED:20211118T094032Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260105T095146Z
UID:10001452-1648663200-1648672200@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:Mediterranea & Al-Sit
DESCRIPTION:Mediterranea\n\nFilm Synopsis:The film depicts the Africans’ interaction with Italians\, and their lives as migrant workers\, which includes friendships and animosities\, boredom\, and temptation. \n\nContent Warning: violence\, gore\, profanity\, alcohol and drugs consumption\, smoking\, frightening & intense scenes\, sex & nudity\, PG 18+ \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAl-Sit\n\nFilm Synopsis:In a cotton-farming village in Sudan\, 15-year-old Nafisa has a crush on Babiker\, but her parents have arranged her marriage to Nadir\, a young Sudanese businessman living abroad. Nafisa’s grandmother Al-Sit\, the powerful village matriarch\, has her own plans for Nafisa’s future. But can Nafisa choose for herself? \n\nContent: Short film\, in Arabic with English subtitles \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe screening followed a community discussion facilitated by Professor Trish Kahle. \n\n\nTrish Kahle is an Assistant Professor of history at Georgetown University Qatar. Her work focuses on history of energy\, work\, and politics in the modern United States and the world. Currently\, she is working on her first book\, which traces the emergence of energy citizenship—a form of national belonging defined by the rights and obligations of energy production\, distribution\, and consumption—from the coal mining workplace in the modern United States. A second project examines the role of utility companies in defining what counts as “energy work” by organizing both individuals and communities into energy producers and energy consumers. Her research has appeared in Labor\, the Journal of Energy History/ Revue d’Histoire de l’Énergie\, and American Quarterly. Support for my work has come from the Mellon Foundation\, the Jefferson Scholars Foundation at the University of Virginia\, the American Society for Environmental History\, the Western Association of Women Historians\, the Labor and Working-Class History Association\, the Center for the History of Business\, Technology\, and Society\, the University of Chicago\, and several research libraries.
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/mediterranea_alsit/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:Race & Society,Sudan
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20220322T180000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20220322T203000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015034
CREATED:20211110T080301Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20221129T110010Z
UID:10001451-1647972000-1647981000@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:Harriet
DESCRIPTION:Film Synopsis:The extraordinary tale of Harriet Tubman’s escape from slavery and transformation into one of America’s greatest heroes\, whose courage\, ingenuity\, and tenacity freed hundreds of slaves and changed the course of history. \n\nContent Warning: violence & gore\, cruelty\, torture\, profanity\, alcohol consumption\, frightening. Rated R\, PG 18+\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFree Screening  \n\nLOCATION: To be updated closer to the date. \n\nThe film was screened on March 22 and was followed by a community discussion facilitated by Professor Brittany Bounds  \n\n\nBrittany Bounds teaches critical thinking and social skills through U.S. History and American Military History to undergrads at TAMU-Q. She is also the co-chair of the Women’s Faculty Forum\, which supports female faculty\, academic staff\, and students at the university. She also advises the Engineering Entrepreneurship Society who encourage students to combine their engineering and business skills. Dr. Bounds further engages students through STEAM by putting the A into STEM through the annual Showcase of student projects that display creativity through video and poster. Dr. Bounds obtained her Ph.D. in U.S. History with an emphasis in social/cultural and military/diplomatic history at Texas A&M University in College Station. Her research centers on U.S. history and how its roots explain current debates in American society. Her dissertation explored the Silent Majority’s reaction to the social movements of the 60s: the response to civil rights\, campus liberals\, antiwar protesters\, racial riots\, and women’s liberation by examining written modes of communication from a media-silenced American majority. Her publications include topics on the Civil War\, 1960s culture\, and counterterrorism. \n\n\n\n 
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/harriet/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:Race & Society
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20220320T180000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20220320T193000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015034
CREATED:20220315T122259Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220329T061254Z
UID:10001462-1647799200-1647804600@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:How Has the World Cup 2022 Changed Qatar?
DESCRIPTION:Ever since Qatar was awarded the hosting rights for the FIFA World Cup 2022TM in December 2010\, the small state has been criticized for its human rights record in Western media\, particularly by British newspapers. In our panel\, we will discuss the changes that have taken place in Qatar in the last decade and the challenges that remain. We will also focus on migrant workers and women’s rights and how staging the world’s most remarkable sporting event has impacted the diversification of Qatar’s natural gas dependent economy\, and its relations with other countries in the region and worldwide. \n\n\n\n\n\nFeaturing: Danyel Reiche\, Amal Al-Malki\, Gerd Nonneman\, Alexis Antoniades\, Haya Al-Noaimi\, Max Tuñón.
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/how-has-the-world-cup-2022-changed-qatar/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:CIRS Faculty Lectures,FIFA World Cup Series,Panels,Regional Studies
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20220309T090000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20220310T170000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015034
CREATED:20220328T110824Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240313T132007Z
UID:10001463-1646816400-1646931600@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:Qatar’s World Cup Goals: Moving from the Periphery to the Center Working Group I
DESCRIPTION:On March 9-10\, 2022\, CIRS convened the first Working Group under its newly launched research initiative on Qatar’s World Cup Goals: Moving from the Periphery to the Center. The meeting was held as a hybrid event\, allowing for both virtual and in-person participation. The goal of the working group was to bring together scholars from different disciplines to examine the role of the upcoming FIFA World Cup in enabling the state of Qatar to move from the periphery of global sports and politics to the center. Applying both empirical and theoretical lenses\, the invited scholars addressed a number of topics including Qatar’s national security\, the impact of the pandemic on mega-sporting events\, national identity\, tourism\, and sports sponsorships. \n\nThe meeting began with Gerd Nonneman’s discussion on the links between Qatar’s national security and the World Cup. He noted that the Cup was one component of a wider and longer-term security and developmental strategy since the 1990s of raising Qatar’s global visibility\, acquiring economic resources\, moving to sustainability\, and building supportive global networks. Given its small size\, limited hard power resources\, and powerful neighbors\, security has been a key driver of Qatari policies at home and abroad. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) development brought both resources and global economic networks. To the continuing aim of building equally global diplomatic networks was then added the ambition to build a sustainable economy beyond hydrocarbon dependence. Staging the World Cup aimed to serve these goals\, by raising global awareness of the “Brand Qatar” and helping to lay the foundations for a more diversified economy. It also helped accelerate not only the building of the infrastructural underpinnings for future development\, but equally necessary reforms of migration and labor policies – attempting to match the needs of a viable future economy and global branding with the exploration of an evolving national identity. \n\nThe second session of the working group focused on the World Cup 2022 and the pandemic. Kamilla Swart suggested that Covid-19 was almost entirely unique in how it upended the sporting world. While we are currently witnessing the return of competitive sports at various levels\, the pandemic still remains a threat. In preparation for hosting the World Cup in winter 2022\, Qatar has effectively hosted ‘test events’\, such as the FIFA Arab Cup\, and implemented restrictions and social distancing during the games.  Swart stated that the compact nature of the World Cup will be a challenge\, especially in regards to implementing Covid protocols and managing the influx of the expected visitors. She highlighted that some of the key areas that require research are the nature of Covid protocols\, fan management\, vaccination administration and statuses\, non-communicable disease\, injuries prevention\, and the burden on health care and medical facilities during the games. Swart suggested that new risks and disaster management during the World Cup is a key area requiring new research. \n\nContinuing the discussion on health-related issues\, Andreas Flouris addressed the question of whether serving as hosts to the World Cup leads to the promotion of a healthy lifestyle. Flouris pointed out that\, based on existing health data on Qatar\, 70% of deaths in the country occur due to chronic diseases\, most of which are tied to obesity and low levels of physical activity. Qatar has adopted policies and undertaken new interventions such as tobacco-free policy\, building of recreational spaces for physical activity\, and the Tamreen education programs in schools that are all geared towards promoting healthy lifestyle. The Ministry of Health in Qatar is engaged in a 3-year collaboration with the World Health Organization for health promotion. Health and nutrition programs have also been developed in the country. However\, the core question of whether the 2022 FIFA World Cup has enabled an overall healthier lifestyle in Qatar still needs to be addressed. Are there efforts underway to encourage the aging citizen population to adopt healthier habits? At a global level\, there is little evidence on whether mega sporting events such as the World Cup actually have a positive health impact on host countries. Flouris suggested that there is a need to collect baseline and longitudinal data and compare Qatar with other countries that have hosted the World Cup. Additionally\, Flouris discussed the lack of school physical education curriculum and the impact of a harsh environment and desert climate as being critical issues affecting patterns of physical activity. \n\nAndreas Krieg examined how Qatar’s engagements in Afghanistan as well the hosting of the World Cup 2022 have both been means by which the state has exhibited its soft power. Post Arab Uprisings Qatar has been translating its financial power into regional and global influence\, and the World Cup and Afghanistan have served as sites where Qatar has been able to display its power of appeal and attraction.  Krieg stated that diplomacy\, investment\, energy and LNG demand\, education and developmental policies\, and sports are the main tools through which Qatar is trying to achieve its policy goals. Whereas military action is the least influential lever of its soft power. The World Cup has put Qatar and the MENA region on the global map and the Afghanistan moment has helped Qatar build networks and increase regional influence in Asia. Bridging the gap between the western world and Islamic countries and the exploration of Qatar’s potential as a mediator were identified by Krieg as key areas of further research. \n\nDanyel Reiche focused his remarks on the topic of Qatar Airways and its sports sponsorships\, with Germany’s leading football club Bayern Munich serving as a case study.  Reiche stated that Qatar Airways\, which has been operational for 25 years\, has been leveraged by the state to achieve various state objectives including enhancing its visibility in the global realm. Qatar Airways has a history of sports sponsorships which was amplified post the financial crisis of 2008.  The airline was the shirt sponsor for Barcelona from 2013-2017 and is currently Bayern Munich’s sleeve sponsor in an agreement that started in 2018 and goes until 2023. Reiche explained that while these sponsorships give the state of Qatar a lot of exposure\, they also show the limitations of soft power approaches. These sponsorships have met with a lot of resistance on the ground in the European states where these teams are based. Reiche suggested there was a need to explore why there is such a persistent critique of this particular sponsor and not of others from non-democratic countries. \n\nRoss Griffin examined Qatar’s national identity in relation to the Qatari-owned French football club Paris St. Germain (PSG). Griffin suggested that Qatar has used sports to shape its national identity while simultaneously positively projecting its identity to the rest of the world. The acquisition of PSG has been part of state efforts to promote a global image of Qatar as a progressive state.  Much of the attention that Qatar has garnered from the global sporting world since being awarded the bid to host the 2022 World Cup Qatar has been negative. PSG has partially served to dissipate some of that negative attention. Griffin outlined that some key questions to explore would be to look at how the ownership of PSG defines Qatar’s national identity. How do PSG fans react to this ownerships and how progressive national identity is being achieved with the hiring of elite and famous football players? \n\nSebastian Sons led the discussion on the nexus of Qatar’s development assistance and sport. He detailed Qatar’s humanitarian aid portfolio in recent years and stated that Qatar’s development assistance has been closely related to domestics polices\, economic diversification\, geo-strategic interests and its ideological affiliations. In recent years\, there was a fundamental shift in the nature of the aid provided. It shifted from Islamic forms of aid to development assistance\, with the focus on financing youth and female developmental projects. Sons specified that the main point of query is to question how do sports come into this story of Qatar’s developmental aid. He narrated that Qatar has been financing sports developmental projects in partner countries and on a domestic level\, but it remains unclear what are Qatar’s interests in becoming a hub of exchange and human development in the fields of sports and development. Examining what role sports play in regional integration and cooperation\, in identity construction and migration through different development projects\, were some key areas identified. \n\nKristian Coates Ulrichsen explored Qatar’s New Development Model and argued that over the years Qatar has built a branding model that is based on diplomacy. Qatari policy making\, which is influenced by the Qatar Vision 2030 has aimed to build a unique developmental model. Various construction\, infrastructure development projects\, and domestic policy changes have propelled the country towards a progressive state. During the blockade of 2017 regional associations and collaborations were affected which now have been revived. Ulrichsen argued that there is a need to examine what tangible legacy this model will have and what measures could be undertaken in regard to migrant labor issues that the country has been facing since winning the bid for hosting the World Cup.  \n\nIrene Theodoropoulou led the discussion on Sports Tourism in Qatar and FIFA 2022 for the next session. She argued that Qatar will be using tourism to rectify its global image and diversify its economy. Qatar Tourism has combined the traditional with modernity to develop a new tourism strategy that aims to put Qatar on the global map in terms of culture\, sports\, business\, and family entertainment tourism. A new airport and visa free arrival policy has been developed to diversify tourism in the country. Theodoropoulou highlighted that further study needs to be conducted in the areas of intercultural communications in Qatar\, demographics of tourists expected during the World Cup\, improving relations and developing synergies between Qatar Tourism and Qatar Airways\, and developing better media relations.  \n\nThe discussion then shifted to beIN sports and its global influence. Craig LaMay addressed beIN’s dominance over football broadcasting in the MENA region as well as coverage of other sports in the U.S. and UK. He stated that since beIN was a private entity\, publicly available records of its operations do not exist. beIN’s regional and global operations have been severely affected during the pandemic\, and the company will need to innovate in order to be competitive and to retain its broadcasting rights. Its model of pay-TV is being challenged by streaming services and even free-to-air alternatives. beIN’s traditional bundled service not only faces competition from new models and a variety of cheaper services but also has to deal with issues such as piracy and non-live content provision for its customers across the globe. \n\nUday Chandra and Aisha Al-Kuwari initiated the conversation on Qatar 2022 and Popular Culture. Chandra argued that there is a need to understand the nature of fandom in Qatar and how the preparations for the World Cup have remade popular culture. Aisha explained that fan culture in Qatar is associated with a fireej or neighborhood\, and fans had loyalties to the local clubs established by community elders in these neighborhoods. She added that fandom was also associated with the culture of majlises\, in which people gather to watch games and root for teams. Women’s increasing participation in football fandom in Doha\, including in stadiums in the recent Arab Cup\, and the limitations of gender stereotypes in journalistic accounts also came through in Aisha’s remarks. With respect to non-citizens\, Chandra spoke of their absence from discussions of fandom and popular culture in Qatar and highlighted recent scholarship that shows strong loyalties to host societies in the Gulf. Although migrant workers recurrently appear as mute victims in Western European commentary on the World Cup\, labor activism by these workers remains understudied.  \n\nThe next session looked at Aspire Zone and its rise to become a Global Benchmark for Talent Development and Sports Medicine. Paul Brannagan explained that small states tend to find niche industries that are culturally different and sets them apart from their neighbors. For Qatar\, sports is the niche industry through which it is making a mark on the global stage. Aspire Zone and Sports Academy are part of Qatar’s sporting strategy and aids the State in building its sports portfolio. Brannagan identified that there is the need to examine how and where Aspire fits in Qatar’s sporting investments and global political agenda. He also highlighted that through Aspire\, Qatar is producing a stream of athletes and is showing its ability of overcoming the disadvantage of its population size. The legacy of Aspire post-2022\, the role of Aspire in sports humanitarianism\, and global sports medicine were some other key research areas identified.  \n\nJohan Granberg discussed community building and the Education City Stadium. He stated that identity doesn’t make people stay and that people required environments that they could co-exist with. Building a stadium in a city is a good project for the city and helps build its image but there are very little examples of these buildings being good for the community. The stadium in Education City might be a good example of a good stadium but lacks the communal aspect and engagement required by society. He stressed that often stadiums become beautiful object that has very little use for the community after the games. Granberg expressed that the questions of how the Education City community can use the arena and what can be gained from it requires further exploration and research. \n\nTh last session of the meeting looked at Sport Security and the Role of the International Center for Sports Security (ICSS). Magda De Lange expanded on ICSS’s role in addressing safety and security in global sporting events. She stated that while work has been done to address issues of safety and security in traditional sports\, research on esports remain limited. An athlete-centered esports ecosystem is developing as a new trend. Of critical concern is that there are sparse\, decentralized resources for collegiate esports players and limited regulation or fact-checking for practices. Gaps in the existing scholarship which could benefit from academic exploration and new research are: research on how to provide consistent guidelines to support young esports players; dual careers of esports athletes; the use and promotion of esports as an added value for P/CVE interventions to increase societal resilience and empowerment. Esports research’s key barriers and key considerations include understanding the ecosystem of esports\, sampling by device\, then by game genre\, examining the positive impacts of esports\, and emphasizing equity in players. \n\nIn conclusion\, Dean Clyde Wilcox\, Director of CIRS\, thanked the participants for identifying key gaps in the literature. It is worth noting that invited participants will contribute empirically grounded papers addressing questions and gaps identified during the meeting\, among others\, to be published in an edited volume under the auspices of CIRS. The second working group for the project will be held in Fall 2022. \n\nIn conclusion\, Dean Clyde Wilcox\, Director of CIRS\, thanked the participants for identifying key gaps in the literature. It is worth noting that invited participants will contribute empirically grounded papers addressing questions and gaps identified during the meeting\, among others\, to be published in an edited volume under the auspices of CIRS. The second working group for the project will be held in Fall 2022. \n\nTo view the working group agenda\, click hereTo read the participants’ biographies\, click hereRead more about this research initiative\n\nParticipants and Discussants:  \n\nAisha Al Kuwari\, Georgetown University in QatarHend Al-Muftah\, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies\, QatarMariam Al-Thani\, Georgetown University in QatarZahra Babar\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarKathy Babiak\, University of MichiganMisba Bhatti\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarPaul Brannagan\, Manchester Metropolitan University\, UKUday Chandra\, Georgetown University in QatarKristian Coates Ulrichsen\, Rice UniversityMagda de Lange\, International Center for Sport Security (ICSS)\, QatarAndreas Flouris\, University of OttawaJohan Granberg\, Virginia Commonwealth University–QatarRoss Griffin\, Qatar University Andreas Krieg\, King’s College LondonCraig LaMay\, Northwestern University in QatarSuzi Mirgani\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarGerd Nonneman\, Georgetown University in QatarDanyel Reiche\, Georgetown University in QatarSebastian Sons\, Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient (CARPO)Kamilla Swart\, Hamad bin Khalifa University (HBKU)Irene Theodoropoulou\, Qatar UniversityElizabeth Wanucha\, CIRS – Georgetown University QatarClyde Wilcox\, Georgetown University in Qatar\n\nArticle by Misba Bhatti\, Research Analyst at CIRS
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/qatars-world-cup-goals-moving-from-the-periphery-to-the-center-working-group-i/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:Regional Studies
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2022/03/Untitled-design-1.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20220308T173000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20220308T203000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015034
CREATED:20211110T080209Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20221129T110042Z
UID:10001449-1646760600-1646771400@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:Adanggaman 
DESCRIPTION:Film Synopsis:In West Africa during the late 17th century\, King Adanggaman leads a war against his neighboring tribes\, ordering his soldiers to torch enemy villages\, kill the elderly and capture the healthy tribesmen to sell to the European slave traders. When his village falls prey to one of Adanggaman’s attacks\, Ossei manages to escape\, but his family is murdered except for his captured mother. Chasing after the soldiers in an effort to free her\, Ossei is befriended by a fierce warrior named Naka. \n\nContent Warning: violence\, brutality\, racial slur\, sensitive subject\, PG 18+ \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFree Screening  \n\nLOCATION: Georgetown University Qatar \n\nThe film was screened on March 8 and was followed by a community discussion facilitated by Professor James Hodapp \n\n\nJames Hodapp is an Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University in Qatar in the Liberal Arts Program where his primary focus is African and postcolonial literature and visual cultures.  His work on literature\, cinema\, comic arts\, television\, and podcasts from Africa have appeared in Journal of Commonwealth Literature\, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing\, African Literature Today\,  ARIEL\, Research in African Literatures\, and English in Africa\, among others. He is also the editor of the collections Afropolitan Literature as World Literature and Graphic Novels and Comics as World Literature from Bloomsbury academic publishing.  
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/adanggaman/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:Race & Society
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20220215T173000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20220215T200000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015034
CREATED:20211110T080226Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240313T132054Z
UID:10001450-1644946200-1644955200@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:Tula: The Revolt
DESCRIPTION:Film Synopsis:On Curaçao in the Dutch West Indies\, Tula leads a revolt. The enslaved people who seized their freedom on the island in 1795 would be brutally repressed and slavery reimposed\, but today the revolt is recognized as being the beginning of the end of slavery in the Dutch Caribbean. Leinders’ film features actor Danny Glover\, who has advocated and worked to bring stories of slave revolution to the American cinema. \n\nContent Warning: history\, war\, violence\, racial bias\, PG 18+ \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe film was screened on February 15 and was followed by a community discussion facilitated by Professor Trish Kahle \n\n\nTrish Kahle is an Assistant Professor of history at Georgetown University Qatar. Her work focuses on history of energy\, work\, and politics in the modern United States and the world. Currently\, she is working on her first book\, which traces the emergence of energy citizenship—a form of national belonging defined by the rights and obligations of energy production\, distribution\, and consumption—from the coal mining workplace in the modern United States. A second project examines the role of utility companies in defining what counts as “energy work” by organizing both individuals and communities into energy producers and energy consumers. Her research has appeared in Labor\, the Journal of Energy History/ Revue d’Histoire de l’Énergie\, and American Quarterly. Support for my work has come from the Mellon Foundation\, the Jefferson Scholars Foundation at the University of Virginia\, the American Society for Environmental History\, the Western Association of Women Historians\, the Labor and Working-Class History Association\, the Center for the History of Business\, Technology\, and Society\, the University of Chicago\, and several research libraries.
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/tula-the-revolt/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:American Studies,Race & Society
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20220202T080000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20220202T170000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015034
CREATED:20220220T085851Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240313T132126Z
UID:10001461-1643788800-1643821200@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:Who Belongs to a Country? National Representation and Identity at the FIFA World Cup 2022
DESCRIPTION:Panelists: Zahra Babar\, Gijs van Campenhout\, Ross Griffin\, Edward J. Kolla\, and Peter Sprio \n\nModerator: Danyel Reiche \n\nThe panel discussion explored critical issues such as the recruitment and naturalisation of top foreign athletes\, a practice that is making national dreams come true\, but also stirring public debate around sports and national identity. Centering on Qatar’s role in shaping the global conversation around sports and society\, the webinar covered a range of topics\, including the reasons athletes switch nationalities and the citizenship requirements set forth by international sporting federations such as FIFA. The panelists also explored conceptions of ethnicity and civic nationalism\, and the future of citizenship and residency laws in a globalised world.
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/who-belongs-to-a-country-national-representation-and-identity-at-the-fifa-world-cup-2022/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:FIFA World Cup Series,Panels,Regional Studies
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20220201T180000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20220201T203000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20211110T080145Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240313T132147Z
UID:10001448-1643738400-1643747400@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:Daughters of the Dust
DESCRIPTION:Film Synopsis:Languid look at the Gullah culture of the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia where African folk-The women of the Peazant family struggle with a decision which will remake their relationship with their heritage and with each other. Julie Dash’s groundbreaking 1991 film tells the story of generational change in the Gullah community of the South Carolina sea islands with rich visual language and non-linear narrative.   \n\nContent Warning: drama\, romance\, violence\, profanity\, racial bias\, PG 18+ \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe film was screened on February 1 via a virtual event and was followed by a community discussion facilitated by Professor Dana Olwan \n\n\nDana Olwan is an Associate Professor in the Master of Arts in Women\, Society\, and Development program at Hamad bin Khalifa University. Her work is located at the nexus of feminist theorizations of gender violence\, transnational solidarities\, and critical feminist pedagogies. Her writings have appeared in Signs\, Feminist Formations\, the Journal of Settler Colonial Studies\, American Quarterly\, and Feral Feminisms. Her first book Gender Violence and The Transnational Politics of the Honor Crime was published by Ohio State University Press in 2021. She is co-editor with Chandra Talpade Mohanty of the Reimagining Comparative Feminist Studies book series from Palgrave Macmillan. She teaches courses on feminist theory\, gender politics in the Middle East and North Africa\, and women\, labor\, and development. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n				\n				Additional Resources  			\n			\n								Beyoncé\, Lemonade (2016) \nKatherine McKittrick \n\n Demonic Grounds (Minnesota\, 2006) \nDear Science and Other Stories (Duke\, 2021). \nMay be worth linking directly to her site since there are multimedia formats to engage these texts\, including examples of her citational practices.\n\nSaidiya Hartman \n\n\n\n“Venus in Two Acts” Small Axe\, vol. 12 no. 2\, 2008\, p. 1-14. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/241115\nScenes of Subjection: Terror\, Slavery\, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford\, 1997).\n\n\n\n\nWayward Lives\, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls\, Troublesome Women\, and Queer Radicals (Norton\, 2020)\n\n 
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/daughters-of-the-dust/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:American Studies,Race & Society
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20220118T180000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20220118T203000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20211110T080025Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240313T132212Z
UID:10001447-1642528800-1642537800@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:La última cena - The Last Supper
DESCRIPTION:Film Synopsis:On a Cuban sugar plantation in the 1790s\, a count casts himself as Jesus Christ to re-enact the Catholic holy week with twelve of the men he is enslaving\, until\, on Good Friday\, the enslaved people on the plantation revolt. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s masterpiece was part of the new Latin American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s\, actively engaging the viewer in a process of democratic critique. \n\nContent Warning: drama\, violence & gore\, cruelty\, torture\, frightening and intense scenes\, sensitive subject\, racial slur\,  PG 18+\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe film was screened via a virtual event on January 18 and was followed by a community discussion facilitated by Professor Robert Carson \n\n\nRobert Carson is Assistant Professor of English in the Liberal Arts Program at Texas A&M University at Qatar. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books\, The American Interest\, and The Journal of the Gilded and Progressive Era. He is currently working on a book on political commitment in 20th-century British and post-colonial fiction.
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/la-ultima-cena-the-last-supper/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:American Studies,Race & Society
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20211129T080000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20211129T170000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20211215T112943Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240313T132247Z
UID:10001454-1638172800-1638205200@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:Energy Aesthetics: New Directions in Studying the Cultural Life of Oil
DESCRIPTION:Speakers: \n\nAnne Pasek\, Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment at Trent University \n\nCajetan Iheka\, Associate Professor of English at Yale University \n\nCaren Irr\, Professor of English at Brandeis University \n\nModerators: \n\nVictoria Googasian\, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University- Qatar. \n\nTrish Kahle\, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University- Qatar. \n\nFirat Oruc\, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University- Qatar. \n\n\nTranscript\n\n\n\n				\n				click here to read 			\n			\n								FIRAT ORCU [00:00:02]: Today’s webinar is part of the Energy Humanities Research Initiative\, which has been generously supported by Georgetown Qatar’s Center for International and Regional Studies. Our research initiative now in its second year focuses in particular on the importance of lived experiences to the to the study of Energy’s past\, present and future. We hope to facilitate the emergence of a new focus on energy as lived\, everyday lived experience in order to add complexity and texture to the narratives within the field that have primarily focused on questions of state building\, international relations\, economic development and technological systems. Last year\, we featured an inaugural webinar on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Everyday Energy with Dominic Boyer in Anthropology\, Sarah Pritchard in History\, and Jennifer Wenzel in Literature. In addition\, we had three podcast discussions that focused and drew attention to different material or experiential facets of energy culture\, with Elizabeth Barrios on Venezuelan oil literature\, Anto Mohsin on electricity and everyday life in Doha and Diana Montano on the electrification of Mexico City. Our focus last year led us to closer attention to recurring themes and questions in studying lived experiences of energy such as representation\, affect\, structures of feeling and phenomenology of energy forms. As we were trying to formalize these concepts\, we quickly realized that creative esthetic work with hydrocarbon in particular was a key venue to look at. To this end we produced a new podcast cluster themed as Energy Aesthetics: Representing Lived Experiences of Oil. We brought together creative artists to present their views on how their art deals with energetic life. We spoke with Venezuelan poet and scholar Santiago Acosta on abstract kinetic petro art and with Nigerian artist\, photographer\, and writer Victor Ehikhamenor about his installation\, The Wealth of Nations and hopefully pretty soon with Iranian graphic artist Amin Roshan on his silkscreen printing work with crude oil. You can find all our previous activities on our web page\, and we will share a link on the chat box. We conceived tonight’s webinar with the aim of bringing creative work and academic scholarship on energy together. We are really fortunate to have three distinguished panelists with recently published or forthcoming books to help us navigate new directions in studying the cultural and esthetic life of oil. I am honored to briefly introduce them being fully aware that these introductions are not really adequate to capture comprehensively the brilliant work they have produced. Our first speaker\, Cajetan Iheka\, is Associate Professor of English at Yale University. He’s the author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence Agency and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature 2018\, and a new one just came out from Duke University Press titled\, African Ecomedia: Network Forms Planetary Politics. Our second panelist\, Caren Irr\, is Professor of English at Brandeis University. In addition to being author or editor of five previous books\, she had recently edited a collection of critical essays titled Life in Plastic: Artistic Responses to Petromodernity\, published by University of Minnesota Press. And our third panelist\, Anne Pasek is the Canada Research Chair in media\, culture and the environment and an Assistant Professor cross-appointed between the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment at Trent University. Her forthcoming monograph entitled Fixing Carbon: Mediating Matter in a Warming World\, is a comparative study of how carbon became legible to different communities to different effects. The running order for tonight will be as follows. Each of our panelists will give their introductory remarks about the panel theme for about seven minutes. This will be followed by a moderated discussion session\, which will be facilitated by Vicky. During this discussion\, we will pose a question to a specific panelist and then offer time for other panelists to respond to that answer to build on a point they have raised and so on. And finally\, we will open the floor to audience discussion questions. Trish will moderate the audience Q&A session and wrap up the discussion. Two housekeeping items\, one at the bottom of the screen at the very right. You will find an icon for close captioning\, which will provide a live transcript and two\, our attendees can post questions at any time using the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen. We will make sure to address them during the Q&A session. Finally\, I would like to announce that we are in the process of drafting a call for papers and initial virtual working group on energy and affect theory with the goal of a special journal issue. Those who are interested in participating in or learning more about the project or have suggestions\, please kindly get in touch with us. Now I will go ahead and give it to Cajetan for his opening remarks. \nCAJETAN IHEKA [00:07:58]: Thank you so much for that amazing introduction\, and to you and Trish and Vicky for their excellent invitation. It’s a pleasant surprise when it came\, and it was exciting to see the work you’re doing. I wish this was in-person\, but we’ll make do with this and hopefully\, we’ll have opportunities to work in the future. So I’m just going to share screen\, because I just want to share a few images\, including Victoria Ehikhamenor’s work that was mentioned in the introduction. So basically\, I’ll just talk through them. So I just want to talk through the notion of “oil afterlives” in the Niger Delta and more broadly\, and one of the things that struck me as I worked on my new book\, which just came out\, “African Ecomedia\,” is really the way that oil is scholars have talked about the saturation of oil in our lives. I’m thinking of Bob Johnson’s recent work on mineral rites. The way that oil expenditure really saturates our life. But it seems to me too as I was researching this book\, that even as artists\, writers\, and scholars we’ve also been unable to escape oil. I realized that for a chapter where I was working on oil that was where I had the most material to work with and for other materials like\, say\, uranium\, where there were\, at least from the African context\, there were fewer artistic productions to work with\, or the same way that there’s a parallel between the saturation of oil in our lives and its saturation in cultural production. I thought that was something I wanted to start with. For us to think about oil’s materiality\, not only as an object of producing material\, but also the way that it has become the form and thematic content of too much cultural production\, especially from the global south. So that’s the one place that I want to start. So then oil in culture productions\, animating culture productions\, like this mural\, which is in Mayo County\, in Ireland\, we begin to see the way that it’s the oil movement. So we see in this particular image of a Niger Delta writer-activist\, an environmental matter if we think about the fact that this month marked 16 years that the Nigerian government killed Saro-Wiwa for his activism against oil exploration in the Niger Delta. But\, what then makes this community in Ireland to choose Ken Saro-Wiwa as the icon of this mural\, which they were developing as a protest against Shell’s plan to position an oil pipeline in their community? So we find a situation here where we find this crisscrossing that oil makes possible: the Nigerian community meeting an Irish community — a Nigerian community that’s been devastated by oil and one that is about to enter the oil business. So oil here becomes this animating principle that joins Nigeria to this European scene of oil production. So\, in a way then\, oil becomes this…it takes on this transnationality in this particular example that we’re seeing now. In the same way too\, in addition to bringing these communities together oil is taking on…it becomes the medium through which the human and non-human meet. Ken Saro-Wiwa protesting against the devastation of his indigenous community\, but is also interested in the way that oil is affecting the landscape. And we see the vegetation here struggling to breathe\, in this particular image\, struggling to make an appearance in this image\, we see that as a marking: that’s a boundary\, that’s a border\, the borderland\, the contact zone. So oil featuring and functioning as a contact zone\, not just where two communities meet\, but also where humans and non-humans meet for interaction. Then of course\, there’s also the question of oil infrastructure itself\, the way that media has come to deal with oil infrastructure itself. And as we look at the future of oil\, one of the things that have been interesting to me at the moment is what happens in places like Niger Delta\, what happens to this oil infrastructure as we move to renewables\, as we move to non-fossil fuel. The insightful work that has been done in environmental humanities from Rob Nixon and others\, have shown us more clearly the durability of oil. I’m thinking of Caren’s new work on plastic\, for example\, the way that they outlive…the long-lasting durée of this material. So what then? What do we do with this archival infrastructure that remains potent\, that remains toxic\, that remains active\, even post-renewable? As the world moves on from oil\, will these communities in the Niger Delta and other parts of the fringes\, if we can call them that…the margin…what happens to these communities as oil moves on…as we move on from oil. That’s something I’ve been thinking about. And what role will cultural production play in this afterlife of oil? But again\, there’s a sense in which one of the things that we think about\, ultimately\, then is to hold on to this notion of afterlife and interrogate it when it comes to oil\, when it comes to plastic. To what extent\, what is this “after”? That’s one something I’ve been I’ve started thinking about: what does “after” mean? What does “after” mean within the context of the continuous radiation of oil\, even when we’ve moved on from it? Even when we moved on from these communities. I’m thinking of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s community Ogoniland where\, after his execution\, Shell left the area\, and it was said that oil production has stopped. But did production really stop after Shell left? With the continuous spill from the pipelines\, the corrosion of the pipelines\, and what that means for contaminating the earth\, contaminating the water in this environment. So the notion of “after” is something that I’ve been thinking about\, more recently. I was contacted by an artist working in Nigeria in the Niger Delta\, who is using pipelines\, the discarded pipelines in the Niger Delta\, to produce art. So he reached out I would send my work to talk about the process of producing the work with me. And it struck me that this is the moment where he is working a stream in pictures of working with this material\, which is black\, blackened from oil\, from those and I’m thinking about the kind of entanglements\, that kind of transcorporeality that is happening in that moment of artistic production\, where he is immersed in oil\, so to speak\, and what does that mean for him? But also for the communities that have been immersed in oil over time before these pipelines were discarded and he is using them for his artistic production. Then the other thing to think about\, for me\, beyond thinking of oil as this contact zone beyond thinking of its afterlives\, when we have moved on. Is to think of the way that its the kind of binary structure\, if you can call it that\, that oil produces. And this is Victor Ehikhamenor’s work “The Wealth of Nations\,” which he first exhibited in 2015 in Indonesia at this biennale. And it’s interesting to me that the way that this resonates…the way that the situation in Niger Delta\, which is the context of Victor’s work\, the way it resonated with this history of violence — energy violence — in that community as well\, in the same way that the Nigerian context works with the Irish example that I started with at the beginning. But the other thing that is interesting here is the way that pleasure\, the way that spectacle\, the way that pleasure becomes kind of an animated impulse here and that it’s easy to lose sight of the violence of oil. As we take in this particular exhibit. So unless you know the history of oil violence in Nigeria… that these drums also serve as…they’ve also been used by the Nigerian state in the 1990s…they were used for the extrajudicial executions that were happening in the country\, when many people were lined up\, when people put protesters\, so-called protesters were lined up\, tied to drums like this\, and executed for their protest against the Nigerian state. But again\, think about it\, what is the thing that the Nigerian state is most concerned about\, which is the preservation of oil wealth. It is to make sure that oil wealth continues to flow uninterrupted\, not because it would be used as a common wealth\, but because it is such\, that it will fuel the pockets of Nigerian leaders. So here we begin to see the way that oil projects are becoming complete. Oil aesthetics is an incomplete aesthetics. Inasmuch as it shows…it links spaces…Inasmuch as it brings into view areas of the world that wouldn’t normally come into existence. We also begin to see them as incomplete projects. They need a filling out. They need contextualization. They need aestheticization. So the cultural life of oil itself is incomplete I think. When we speak about representation so that what we’ll find here are ways that images\, text\, and other kinds of cultural production the way that with oil\, there is always something that exceeds the grasp of the representation before us. So that’s oil always needs a supplement inasmuch as it is a fundamental aspect of our lives. So\, yeah\, that’s where I would stop. I’m hoping I would be able to flesh out things when we would get to the conversation proper. \nORUC [00:21:12]: Thank you. Thanks so much for those remarks\, Cajetan. Caren\, please take it away. \nCAREN IRR [00:21:22]: I was going to start sharing. Yes\, because I want to share something. So\, OK. All right. Thank you. I’m going to share the slides that I’ve prepared too. And these are basically slides just to give you a little bit more concrete sense of some of the contributions to this collection that Firat mentioned that just came out Like in Plastic. And this is a collection that I started working on kind of like 2017\, when the\, in the U.S.\, at least we were having lots and lots of public discussion about banning plastic bags and straws. And though these very small items that you see around you as as waste\, as things\, you know\, bags cut in trees and so on and became a kind of target of attention. I actually would be really interested to know why at that moment\, these long standing issues with those two particular items have really kicked in. But whatever the reason\, there was a dramatic rise in interest in the questions relating to waste\, plastic waste and consumption or overconsumption. And I really wanted to see if there were ways to anchor those concerns with consumption in a broader economy of extraction and production of these of these synthetic polymers. So in other words\, could we could we attach\, the visible parts of everyday life that take the form of\, you know\, single use\, cheap\, often kind of colorful and supposedly super hygienic plastics to the dirty economy\, much more widespread\, underground and at a distance from the everyday lives of most American consumers. So that was the kind of question that I started with. And then I I did\, of course\, a group of the smartest people that I could think of. I am on this on this topic and got great\, great and interesting essays that had to do with the ways that plastic is reckoned with in contemporary sculpture\, in comics\, in eco poetry\, in the realist novel\, in science fiction in a little bit. I have a piece on film and a chapter on on vinyl and the LP and how music culture kind of is dependent on a plastic substructure. And one of the things that emerged from this group of essays that kind of surprised me. I guess I should show you the cover of the Table of Contents for my book. Here I am. One of the things that really surprised me was how many of the essays that people were writing really hinged on the question of the human body\, from the organs of perception\, to the interior\, to the life cycle\, from birth to death and and a kind of unearthly afterlives\, to use Cajetan’s word. And so many\, so many of these things that people were writing about kind of touched on this question of whether we have the same human body in an environment that’s saturated by plastics. Definitely the people attending to these questions that I thought would be everybody’s question\, which is\, how is plastic the face of the petro economy? But I was really interested in this other in this other theme in the sensorium and the massive anxieties about the transformations to the human body that occur when the petro economy kind of takes this form in our everyday lives. And I guess just as a parenthesis\, I want to say that I’m well aware that only about nine percent of the oil and natural gas\, extractions produce plastics are used to produce plastics. But there’s a lot of interest. There’s been a lot of interest in forecasting whether those numbers will change. In the US mots of our plastic comes from natural gas. But I think that varies in different parts of the world. But everywhere around the world\, the predictions are that there’s going to be a massive in continuing escalation of the amount of plastic produced to the end. If projections about shifting towards renewable energy sources for things like heating and transportation continue\, that means that the portion of fossil fuels that are used to produce plastics is is highly likely to expand some. I read an article earlier that was in Forbes magazine predicting that as much as 45 percent of fossil fuel production will be used to produce plastics by 2040. So these projections you never really know\, but I think the general trend of an increasing portion of the petro economy on taking the shape of plastics is is a good take away there. So let me just give you a little flavor of what the what the contributors did for this\, for this collection. And I’ve chosen one from each from each piece. So Jane Kuenz from University of Southern Maine wrote a terrific piece about the Body Worlds exhibit. You know\, more than 50 million people have seen this exhibit. It’s traveled around the world\, and it’s comprised of these actual human bodies that were. They’re donated or scavenged for these exhibits and then preserved using this special process that the kind of main force between the exhibit Gunther von Hagens refers to as plastination\, essentially injecting existing organs and musculature and so on with polymers that fix the body in these in these various poses. You know\, in principle\, according to the organizers of these exhibits\, they’re supposed to be educational and kind of teach you about the glory and the beauty of the interior of the human body and promote healthy practices. Because\, like they’ll show you lungs darkened by smoke and compare those to\, the healthy lungs. So but\, you’re not looking at a healthy human body\, you’re looking at a plastic version of a human body. And there is something very unearthly about this way of preserving and ripping off the skin to create the spectacle of a body that is has outlasted\, its subject in various ways. And Jane’s essay beautifully unpacks the centrality of plastic to this to this medicalized understanding of bodies\, as well as a culture of spectacle on which in which it relies. And it’s\, I think\, just fascinating. I’m in the second section that’s more to do with with petro capitalisms. Chris Breu has a really interesting essay about Richard Powers’s novel Gain and the relationship between cancer clusters and illness\, and that kind of corporate production of oil derived pesticides and cleaning products and so on. And he develops\, Breu develops this interesting concept of the petrochemical unconscious. Kind of riffing off of other versions of the unconscious\, especially Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious. And what he’s interested in is\, again\, that that relationship between what we can see and immediately experience in this case\, the experience of illness and the underlying economy and organization of our material life that’s allows that experience to emerge. So petro petrochemicals and their corporate use and circulation and sort of seepage into our everyday environments is the dynamic that brew and articulates. And he has an interesting way of of\, if I may say\, refining the concept of. Refining the concept of the unconscious to to suggest that it’s a version of like the non-conscious. It’s not that we can’t be aware of these elements of our life\, it’s that we actively repress them in order to sustain something like unendurable private life. And I think that’s a really interesting dynamic I’d love to talk more about. And so from after death to illness\, we move in in Margaret Ronda’s interesting essay on Eco-poetics into Birth. She has a beautiful reading of Craig Santos Peres’s The Age of Plastic\, a poem in which the poet is meditating on his daughter’s birth and the presence of\, plastic medical care equipment right there. From the very first seconds of her life\, she’s wrapped in plastic and touched in someone. These are her first sensory experiences\, outside of the womb. And I think that’s a that’s a really chilling kind of idea. And he’s both excited by and disturbed by the role of plastics in the birth in the birth process and kind of confronts the the the tenderness of the newborn’s skin with this kind of solidity and artificiality of the medical equipment. And then Adam Dickinson’s\, Anatomic which she also writes about is involved involves a kind of poetic reflection on these endocrinological experiments or reckonings that records that that the poet does where he’s looking and basically at the and recording the traces of different kinds of plastic byproducts in his own\, in his own body\, bodily fluids. You know\, the whole range of them. So there’s a kind of gothic element that has to do with this interior circulation of these plastic plastic elements. So here we really see that deep anxiety about the petrochemical presence. In human life\, from its earliest moments in through adulthood and finally\, the the last section of the of the book is about\, is there such thing as a post plastic future? You know\, if let’s say that every single ban on plastic was 100 percent effective and people complied with it entirely\, we stopped producing plastics. We’re still living with\, all of the tons and tons of plastic that’s already been produced and that’s clogs up the oceans and\, circulates in our in our water\, in our skin and our food systems and so on. You know what\, what are these futures look like where you have these remainders? And Lisa Swanstrom has a lovely essay where she’s interested in thinking about the role that plastic has played just in shaping visions of the future at all\, and then kind of turns that into questions about these\, these newer or more recent petrochemical anxieties. So she starts with what she calls proto plastic imaginaries in H.G. Wells and a bunch of other writers who envision the their own kind of mock plastics. You know that and reckon with the strange capacities that this malleable\, colorful\, light\, eerily lightweight and so on product has. And then I think through different kinds of worlds where that these essentially alchemical and magical substances can be produced through a number of different energy systems. So they’re kind of excited by in this early 20th century kind of utopian sensibility the the thrills of the benefits of plastic as the base of the petro-economy. And then she shifts to some contemporary stories where the and the blobby\, amorphous shapes and malleable structures of of plastics take on a much more menacing turn. And she’s especially interested in faces in the way that there’s kind of masking of the human face that that emerges as an interesting theme. There are so the post plastic future is still one that we’re looking through. And in her essay\, and some of the others as well that deal with the future kind of ask us to think about whether it’s even feasible to imagine a post plastic future because of the enormous number of years\, centuries\, millennia that it takes time to degrade the plastic that’s already been created. There may in fact\, only be a continuity\, of of plastics. Again\, even if we banned them immediately switched 100 percent to other kinds of energy systems or completely shifted over to bioplastics made from corn or whatever else. So I guess the big takeaway from the collection as a whole\, which moves and all kinds of other directions in addition to those that I’ve outlined\, is that I think it might be a good idea for environmental humanities to maybe let go of a figure that certainly has been really important in American literary history\, which is that figure of Leo Marx’s\, Machine in the Garden\, where it’s the disruption of the the train into the forest. That is that is the kind of signal for the for the problem\, that we’re facing. You know\, the train\, of course\, is coal in its big iron and it’s industrialism. And all those are\, of course\, ongoing crucial issues\, as is the forest and deforestation. But so many of the problems that we are facing\, but not yet fully able to picture to ourselves\, I think relates to this plastic wrapped body\, which I guess I would suggest is as good as a figure\, as useful a figure\, as compelling a figure as the machine in the garden and maybe even more specifically like plastic wrapped meat. You know that earthly experience of peeling back the plastic so that you can extract your food from it and do whatever it is\, you’re going to do\, chop it and cook it and put it inside your own body. That\, I think is a kind of nutshell figure for the face of environmental problems that we’re facing that we experience today. It’s it’s eerie\, it’s common. It’s anxiety producing. It shifts us away from something like the sublimity of the machine in the garden towards what Sianne Ngai calls\, the stuplimity and the esthetic of repetition\, almost tedium and eerie avant-gardeness\, at the same time. And I think so. I guess that’s the takeaway that I have is that the plastic wrapped meat as a figure for our environmental condition can anchor us in the petro-economy and release a bunch of new esthetic projects that allow us to mediate on our environment. You know\, in a way that wakes up our senses and wakes up our our ethical and political imaginaries. Thanks \nORUC [00:38:35]: Thank you\, Caren. This is really fascinating\, and I think what I hear in the first two present\, the opening remarks it is a common term is corporeal entanglements\, but will have further discussions about that. Now finally\, Anne who will close out the first round of the panel\, please. \nANNE PASEK [00:39:00]: Right. Hi\, everyone. I’m going to try and be quick\, so we have lots of time for your discussion. Yeah\, I will get my slides in order. Yeah. So I\,  come to this question through a slightly different trajectory and that I am a cultural studies\, media studies kind of scholar who’s really interested in climate politics. So before I came to care about oil\, my my like commitment was always to like it was per million CO2. And my book project is all about the tricky problems of making carbon legible and like culturally meaningful to different audiences. When\, like the materiality of carbon is a\, is a fraught endeavor because it’s constantly moving through different forms of material\, one of which is petrol carbons. Other forms include like CO2. Our bodies themselves\, rocks\, right? And so it’s it’s a sort of tricky thing to to track and act on politically and therefore a really intriguing problem to me. And so I found myself in Edmonton\, Alberta\, which was also my hometown doing a postdoc with the Petro Cultures Group\, and I was sort of shocked to see this dissonance between my scholarly work\, which was just very much all about\, the media of accounting or of climate denialism and the everyday experiences of being around in the city\, which which had absolutely nothing to say about carbon and where I had tons and tons of say about oil. So I found myself\, coming back to this\, the substance and the world that it makes. But but with less of an aim to write a book about it or an academic article\, and more so to just sort of find a way to express and share some feelings\, right. More more so then some thoughts. So for those who don’t know\, Edmonton\, Alberta is sort of the administrative capital of the province of Alberta\, but also the large oil or tar sands development that happens in the north of the province. And the sort of state revenues from oil dictate the state revenues of the province. And I have a very\, very pronounced thumbprint on the politics therein. But I also thought that it was just really pronounced presence in the city that I was being reintroduced to and wanted to reflect on. Right. So that I think just to give a shout out to the podcast. Santiago Acosta makes this point that oil has multiple ontologies\, right. That it’s both a substance and a abstract financial substance\, right. A commodity that gets traded\, and that this sort of fraught dual nature of it can surface in different art forms can surface in different state practices. And I guess my observation was like\, it’s very much true of affected infrastructure. So my my aims are modest. I wanted to produce something that would be a reflection about Edmonton’s petro-cultures that would circulate in Edmonton and that people who had the same experiences that I was having would know that we shared this condition that we could sort of go deep into everyday life and sort of connect over the weirdness of certain parts of the town\, parts that I think are true of many\, many cities in the global north. Maybe the global south to a degree\, but but which just popped out in this very oily city. So I\, during the pandemic started making some drawings\, writing some text. Compiled it altogether into magazine called everyday oil. And a part of the reason why I was drawing was just to sort of linger really long in place. Think about what it means that like the the heart of the downtown\, the Lake Club District has like a five to six lane highway down the middle of it\, and that people are unfazed by by this huge sort of sensory disruption in the middle of urban life that there are strange\, mysterious pipelines crossing through ravines that we don’t totally know what the substance are. But but were really captivating to me as a child\, right. There’s a really lively culture of resistance and an occupation in relation to ongoing forms of violence\, extraction and statecraft that are trying to build pipelines out of Edmonton into the states where that oil can be brought to market. And so I would find myself with my climate activist friends occupying malls and banks and and just sort of. In the strange experience of making everyday office workers uncomfortable\, but not like unmanageable also and just sort of the overlapping worldviews and affects and emotional management strategies in that moment were were I think an intriguing one to capture. It’s also the case that most of the city’s parks are buried on top of gas pipelines just because this is sort of uninsurable land that can be sort of given over to public benefit as a kind of no cost afterthought. And so being environmental also means living on top of oil infrastructure. Many many people who’ve made out extremely well in the oil industry and who have rather expensive and oil themed country clubs in which a teenager can linger. And\, the attempts to sort of find exit trajectories from oil finance to divest my own like very\, very modest postdoctoral savings in my credit union\, were were not only frustrated but but happens like a block away from the Legislature. And so the overall experience was just of everyday life and infrastructure being as was mentioned earlier\, kind of interestingly\, durable obstacle to imagining other worlds. And I wanted to just capture that and share that. And because I’m a cultural city scholar\, I’m really interested in questions of circulation. So I I kind of have like a suspicion of formal art world institutions. I think\, as Victor Ehikhamenor mentioned in the podcast\, right\, like he can show his art abroad\, but to show it in Nigeria would be to not come too much because there is a kind of way in which folks are closed off to an arts based critique. I think that’s true to a large degree in Edmonton as well. So my my aim here esthetically was to use images to come up with a sort of affective experience\, but also use that aesthetics as a lure. So I produced like hundreds of copies of this scene and dropped it off in like free libraries all around town\, where people will read books or read pieces of art for folks to come and find. And then I also did what I’ve been calling a reverse snowball sample. So I have a little brother who works in the gas industry\, and I gave him a bunch of copies to divide to his friends and then told them to give out further copies that way. So I’m interested in trying to think about modes of thinking and sharing and circulating ideas. These reflections\, right\, to sort of build up a common recognition that we all have these weird moments of encounter with oil infrastructures\, but that\, academic texts and art institutions may not always be the best way to do it. So it’s been an experiment and an interesting one at that. It’s been published in the journal Heliotrope\, so it has the sort of afterlife circulating as an academic research creation product. But the the more immediate goal was just to get this out into the world and see what happens. And then I’ll just quickly add that this is a shifting energy gears\, right. But the sort of spirit of practice space inquiry has lived on in my participation in a project called Solar Protocol. So with a couple of collaborators joined a network of of a very\, very micro solar internet servers\, which are sort of networked across the world and that we’ve published is in on what it might mean make solar-powered media\, why you might want to do so. And what could come of it? And it is involved\, building some technical skills\, but also having a practice where every day I check to make sure my battery is appropriately charged and that I have a kind of interesting\, effective attachment to my little solar system. Based on this practice of care\, which folks on the critical make community have talked a lot about. And I’m sort of interested in also thinking about this sort of making practice sharing that rather than just just the esthetics\, could be an interesting pathway forward. So there is much to say about lower powered internet stuff and the esthetics that obtains to like low power intermittent energy systems as as an interesting way of thinking forward to a future that might look a little more retro than chrome. And also this larger aspirations in the project to build up a global network of solar powered servers because there’s always sun somewhere. So if we can build our technology\, based around those logics of intermittency\, but also constancy\, we might end up somewhere really interesting. But I will I will not dig too deep into that and I will instead. Excited to hear your questions and thoughts. \nORUC [00:48:55]: Thank you so much to all of our speakers for those really stimulating opening remarks. Now we are going to move into the moderated discussion and I am handing over things to my colleague Vicky. \nVICTORIA GOOGASIAN [00:49:11]: Yeah\, thanks Firat\, and thanks to all of you for the comments so far. As Firat mentioned way back at the beginning\, I’m going to direct the questions to each of you in turn to sort of take a first stab at. But I’m hoping that you’ll take the opportunity to respond to each other as well\, because as has already become clear\, these are themes that that really unite all of your work. So I’ll go ahead and start with with Cajetan\, because your work as the title of your recent book suggests gives us this really useful theorization of eco-media. And you say or you argue that that eco-media forms approach the lived experience of energy by\, “encouraging the cultivation of an ecological ethics that entails alertness to others into the world.” And the various instances of eco media that you discuss in your work\, some of which you also sort of highlighted for us already this evening. These are these are instances that illustrate the representational capacity of the visual and media forms for laying bare the commodifying logic of oil extraction and its perversities\, specifically in the Niger Delta. But we wanted to ask you if you can speak a little bit about the limits of that representational capacity. Are there moments where representation fails? And this\, I mean\, this is also\, I think\, following up a little bit on that on the tail end of Anne’s comments as well about the obstacles that this durable infrastructure of oil presents\, even for cultural forms as well. \nIHEKA [00:50:50]: Right. Yeah. Thank you so much for that\, Vicky. As Anne was concluding\, she talked about distributing this in a beautiful zine to broader colleagues\, I was just thinking why it’s so interesting to go back and bring these guys together and have a conversation about what they’re saying\, and what they’re thinking see how that’s…to what extend that interacts with Anne’s intention. But that’s by the way. One of the things that I think about in terms of representational limits\, last night as I was listening to the podcast with Victor\, he was talking about the image with Oloibiri: the tub with the water in his installation. He was talking beautifully about the way that there’s Oloibiri in water and then the oil\, the oil spilling into that. And how it took 48 hours for oil to obliterate the water\, but also the image — the cancelation –if you want to use that…the disappearance of Oloibiri\, which is this community in Nigeria\, where oil was first discovered in 1950s. So that for me\, I think it becomes a paradigmatic case of the limits of representation\, because what do we see when we find\, when we encounter the image of when oil has saturated the water and obliterated Oloibiri? Do we have a complete image if we see it earlier on\, when Oloibiri and oil is still intact in that water? So for me\, representation\, it’s really in this moment when the temporality of artistic production becomes unable to hold at once the multiple significations that is made possible with the oil…sorry\, the water and Oloibiri intact. And then what happens 48 hours later when oil has overtaken everything. Especially now when this image circulates on the internet. When I see the image with Oloibiri intact\, I don’t know what else has happened. I don’t know the kind of obliteration that has happened that would happen if I let oil drip into that water gradually. So I think we find that there’s a problem of temporality there that is compounded by circulation; the fact that we’re not all live witnesses in Indonesia when this was happening\, or in Poland\, where the work was recreated. So the problem of circulation that is banned with temporality\, I think\, is one of the problems of oil. The other thing about representation\,…the other thing about representational image\, and I talk a little bit about this in my new book\, is the way in which sometimes the problem of…part of the problem of oil is the way that the kind of images it invites the image of spectacle that it invites I think oftentimes reduces or undermines the problems that we want to highlight in the first place. There’s a sense some of the images I work with\, they’re images that have been aestheticized. They have become aestheticized in interesting\, fascinating ways. And they run the risk of losing a critical edge\, the critical edge that you hope that viewers will bring to such a work. So the problem of aestheticization\, the problem of temporality\, but also the ways that the problem of contextualization\, I thought\, the ways that these works themselves\, they’re not in themselves self-sufficient. If we think of them as artistic projects fine\, we can all bring our interpretations to them\, and that’s fine. But when we think of them within the science of the kind of activist-political work we’ve been talking about this morning\, the kind of meaning it creates becomes very important. There are moments when those meanings are not reached in some fashion\, especially when we’re dealing with works from different parts of the world. There’s the risk of us absorbing those works also\, instead of dealing with their singularity\, embracing them within our culture. There is a sense in which they become diluted\, they become immersed\, just as oil itself and lose that texture. So\, yeah\, I will stop there. I’m curious to hear what Caren and Anne have to add to that. Yeah\, I think I’ll give you both the opportunity to respond to any of those those I think you’ve given us now three limits of representation that ego media faces temporality\, aestheticization\, and contextualization. \nIRR [00:56:50]: I think that’s such an important question\, and certainly there’s an already existing discussion about the limits of of “mimesis.” You know\, in environmental writing generally\, like does reading a description of a beautiful landscape make you appreciate that landscape in some kind of a deep way that would supplement or even replace kind of immersion in that in that landscape. So that kind of problem about mimesis is replicated in these issues about oil economies and sort of toxic environments kind of more generally does a description\, of a situation of toxicity or of horrific mining practice or fracking or something like that. You know\, function on its own to interpret itself as Cajetan was just saying\, like\, is it self-evident. Etc. So I had to work with that. And then we have these kind of familiar problems about protest literature generally and what happens to that with the kind of ideological redundancies that are built in\, to certain kinds of protest literature where it’s feels too closed not just to function as art\, but to function in a very politically enlivening and energizing way that’s presumably central to the project in the first place. So I think those are crucial questions raised with particular urgency on this topic\, and I guess I’ve been interested in so many other people have in these different kinds of ironic\, skeptical\, horror driven\, kind of cheeseball humor\, dark humor\, kind of driven projects to see if they could produce some\, some detours or some ways\, some unpredictable and oblique points of entry into this whole situation. And I think in the plastics stuff that I’ve been looking at\, they’re interested in\, horror a lot. And I think as an alternative to elegy\, as the as the kind of presumably politically charged esthetic. The difficulty\, though\, is I think more generally and there’s interesting things can happen there. But I think the general difficulty for for petro-esthetics is that we can picture if you\, the infrastructure\, the refinery\, the pipeline\, the gas station or whatever. But the substance itself is difficult\, to envision\, you know\, maybe sometimes you have like the sheen on a on a black surface\, doesn’t that cover image for Richard Powers gains that I showed you a few minutes ago. But like capital\, oil is difficult to see. You see its effects and you see the commodities produced from it\, the kind of intentionally produced commercialized versions. You see the mediations\, but not the substance in circulation itself. And the flip side\, so that’s for the text. The problem with representing toxicities relating to\, petro-economies has that kind of familiar problem of kind of critiques of capitalism\, literature\, critics of capitalism or art\, some critique of capitalism\, but also on the utopian end. If the utopia for. But many people working on on energy issues is keep it in the ground\, right. Then you’re your most utopian image is either the sun which is burned your eyeballs on or\, like the undisturbed ground. Right. So again\, you’re not seeing it\, by definition\, it reminds me and then I’ll stop\, at that. You know\, the effect that Antonioni gives in and Blow Up right. Where at the end of the film\, there’s this famous scene where he’s like showing it’s an imaginary tennis match and the camera’s just kind of moving back and forth. But there’s no ball. You’re actually just looking at the court. But the preceding narrative has trained you to be interested in the drama of just looking at that empty court. Right. I think we need a similarly inventive kind of esthetics that will allow us to see an undisturbed landscape as one where there is a drama\, and an interest. a projects underway and the project is keep it in the ground. And I don’t know what you call that kind of esthetic and a lot of people don’t like blow up. So it wouldn’t be exactly that. But or\, it’s that’s a moment of the kind of post-modernist movement. But I think that’s that’s sort of a a bookmark for esthetic challenges that that we face for envisioning the utopian alternatives to a kind of horrific toxicity which were maybe more at ease with and partly. Yeah. \nPASEK [01:02:32]: I won’t add too much on this because I think so much wonderful things have been said and I don’t want to prevent further questions from being asked. I guess I’ll just sort of pose an open question\, which is that in the environmental humanities\, right\, we often look to artists to to do this esthetic work for us. I’m not sure that is a convincing historical argument\, right. It seems like the way these questions get determined is what social movements make of esthetics and the sort of political energy they invest in them and the way that they make them circulate. And I think that we we can sort of see\, in my backyard if that were right\, like questions over the oil sands versus the tar sand and the sort of fraught questions of like the esthetic spectacle versus the slow violence that have come in that context\, it doesn’t seem like there really is a esthetic that can do it all. And so it does seem like it’s a kind of war of position question where you’re trying to find contextually responsive\, collectively inspiring answers to partial questions that help you move forward one step of the way. \nGOOGASIAN [01:03:47]: I think maybe I’ll I’ll seize that opportunity that you’ve given me to actually direct a question that you\, Anne\, about your your recent work on the effective dimensions of energy and in particular\, how these dimensions are being activated and how these contested narratives of of carbon. And and also maybe to kind of bring us back to this word\, this key word that Firat already highlighted for us\, which is transcorporeality is I think you argue that we have to attend to the transcorporeality of carbon in order to just sort of build these new structures of feeling toward the carbon cycle. And in your recent essay in Environmental Humanities\, which I think Trish already linked in the chat. If anyone’s interested\, you argue\, I think pretty convincingly that climate denialists have already recognized and made use of this embodied transcorporealogic albeit in this kind of dishearteningly familiar appeal to racial and gendered stories about whose bodily experience gets to count. So we might\, I think your comments are already pointing us in this direction. We might want to kind of view the realities of climate changes as a kind of settled fact and turned to artists and artists and cultural practitioners to sort of convey that fact to people. But you’re pointing out to us that the carbon cycle is already at the center of these multiple contested narratives. So I’m just wondering if you want to say anything more about this\, about contesting the story of carbon. What are the…what new openings do we see when we combine effective and narrative work with our structural critique? \nPASEK [01:05:34]: Yeah\, yeah. So to sort of give a little more context about that article. So the article\, which is also going to be a book chapter\, is about how this one particular strain of climate denialism\, I call them “carbon-vitalists\,” argue that because we exhale CO2 out of our bodies and our bodies are in part made of carbon\, as are the bodies of plants and animals and the whole ecosystem. And plants like carbondioxide. Carbondioxide is good and that we should therefore burn as much oil as possible to enrich the atmosphere with carbondioxide to serve the cause of life in cosmic terms\, right. And it’s an argument that borrows from a lot of like ecosystem connection interdependence of esthetics\, as well as really embodied ways of knowing the world. In this case\, knowing it quite incorrectly right. And the bodies that are sort of centered in these arguments are all almost exclusively white men and their families. And the argument brought to bear is that\, you know\, if you call industrial pollution\, pollution carbondioxide\, then you’re sort of saying that our bodies are polluting and that really violates some deeply held racial scripts\, and we will therefore reject your proposition. And I think it’s worthwhile to go to these uncomfortable case studies\, where we see a lot of the tools of feminist anti-racist\, science studies\, or epistemologies or esthetics more broadly being picked up and used by our enemies because it reminds us that our tools aren’t like a priori a political good right. There are ways of appealing to embodied knowledge that are quite harmful and racist and have succeeded in delaying climate action in really substantive federal scales. But so that’s that’s the bad news. The good news to me\, though\, is that you can kind of look at how these esthetics are being mobilized and like\, cry theft\, right. And that there’s something encouraging about the fact that these extremely politically reactionary white guys do want to have a caring relationship for ecosystem\, right. And they do want to to recognize that bodies can produce knowledge and that we should\, you know\, legitimate that. And so the sort of opening that to me suggests is that the goal is to kind of look through the stream of climate denialism\, give a hard no to all of the racist\, sexist stuff at its core. but just sort of see lingering in the chaff there are parts that could be mobilized to some other political project\, right. Like\, I think the way forward here is to to sort of demobilize these movements and redirect those energies towards other projects that fulfill similar affective needs. So I’m interested in thinking about what a future of carbon removal might look like. If we are offering scripts and like actual jobs\, like forms of action\, political and economic that people can take that do position them in that caring role\, whether that is\, getting oil workers to work on carbon removal pipelines or getting rural folks to do soil sequestration for for carbondioxide\, right. It seems like they’re they’re in in like the darkest of of grim political toxins. We can see these sort of ways through and they’re not guaranteed\, right. I think that how one picks up that potential is going to look very different in many different contexts and probably won’t succeed in every case. But it may be useful to to include that in the portfolio of climate politics because we don’t want a world where we are just sort of deepening our commitment and engagement with our in groups. Well\, allowing those who have been politically polarized to continue to be more intensely against us. So I think that’s kind of a one one possible outcome of combining esthetic\, affective and structural analytics and that you can sort of see these new tactical directions for climate strategy. \nGOOGASIAN [01:10:10]: Yeah\, that’s it’s really fascinating\, I was sort of blown away by the idea that the logic of transcorporeality and embodied aspect is something that sort of unites voices from across the political spectrum in this context. I guess I’ll give the opportunity to our other two panelists or respond before I redirect us again here. \nIRR [01:10:40]: I don’t know if people in this conversation have been reading Michael Marder’s work on plants\, plant being. But if I could see it being super useful in that kind of conversation\, he has some lovely concepts about the deep generosity of plants being\, I mean\, sometimes he uses the phrase vegetal-communism to think about this. You know where he’s…these are my leaves\, you know\, here. You know\, if you think about plant being as you know it\, sure\, it absorbs carbon\, but it’s also\, you know\, releasing endlessly releasing exactly what we need to do to breathe. And there’s…he’s got a way of thinking about plants\, not just as passive receptacles or\, you know\, things that are being starved or whatever\, which seems to be the vision of kind of the climate denialists that are the carbon-vitalists is in some sense. But you know\, you’d only have to take introductory biology to understand\, the cycle of that’s involved there. And then to think deeply with plant being as an act of release is I think\, would be an interesting way to build knowledge rather than just shut down\, which is surely if we’re not skilled sketch artists or\, you know\, aren’t engaged directly in art practice\, then certainly producing knowledge and producing pedagogy and is a skill set that the.. we cultivate in academia\, among ourselves and with our students and just being able to kind of seize seize the pedagogy\, the pedagogical prospect\, of a conversation like that\, whether it be at a holiday or\, you know\, at a town meeting or whatever\, it’s important. \nIHEKA [01:12:44]: Yeah. Very quickly. I just…I’m really fascinated by this\, by the idea of really contesting\, the logic of carbon and producing knowledge around it. What I wanted to have to do that…to the amazing comments that have already been made is to think about\, when we think about transcorporeality what kind of bodies are we involving in this connection? I think this becomes especially important in know when we think about\, the global climate movement and the kind of voices and bodies that get emphasized\, I think that’s crucial. I’m thinking about\, I think in the pandemic when\, you know\, when there was…I think it was at Davos\, when the youth…there were just youth climate activists\, you know\, there was a photo of them. And then this Ugandan young activist Vanessa Nakate was cropped out of the photo that The Associated Press had eventually published. You know\, that’s you know\, that’s I think\, you know\, we’re finding in that particular moment\, this example\, you know\, there’s you know\, the connection being made is these young people at that moment. The kind of knowledge mixing that would produce in a new epistemology is being undercut\, undermined\, when certain voices or certain images are removed from the conversation. So I think this has to be part of this knowledge building. Making sure that the future\, the future of global climate activism movements to make sure that voices… It’s not just African voices\, that is indigenous voices\, but those other voices have a place and not just us talking about their worldview\, their ways of seeing the world. That can be part of this new narratives\, of new stories\, new politics\, new knowledge of carbon that is being produced just wanted to add that real quick. \nGOOGASIAN [01:14:51]: Yeah\, thank you all for those comments. I think I’ll just go ahead and ask one more moderated question because I know we want to save some time for the questions we’ve got in the chat as well. But I thought maybe I could direct a final question to Caren to help us think about furturity a little bit. Since this term afterlives has has also been sort of circulating through your comments\, and it was definitely something that I noticed that connected a number of the essays and life in plastic\, which is plasticity\, is almost kind of paradoxical construction of futurity. Plasticity is this kind of toxic form\, on the one hand\, that’s threatening the future of life on the planet. And on the other hand\, it’s a metaphor for survival. The thing that allows your body to survive after death and these amazing and terrifying exhibits in the Body Worlds exhibition. And this is a theme that also emerges particularly strongly in Margaret Ronda’s work on an eco-products as well. And in the introduction\, you write about the plastic utopianism of the 20th century thinkers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Roland Barthe. And then you point out that this is a feeling that that has kind of faded in the ecological crises of of our own century. So I thought I would just ask if you could speak about how plastic or petrochemicals more generally shape our ability to imagine future worlds? \nIRR [01:16:31]: Sure\, and well definitely waste is always a question about the future\, whether it be a spill\, an oil spill or\, you know\, the Great Pacific garbage patch and all that stuff because it’s about what’s persisting\, you know\, what’s ineradicable or what’s going to\, force us to envision a really long term timescale of biodegradableness or non-biodegradableness. So there are futures of that sort that are extrapolations or continuations or durations in some sense. But there’s but that that utopian futurity that you mentioned it a minute ago is\, I think\, well\, it’s not central to the way that we necessarily think about plastic right now. It’s still present. And I think the key to that utopian aspect of of plastics and the many other forms of kind of commodity production in particular that are associated with\, the 20th century boom in the economy. I’m trying to think of\, trying to remember Ernest Mendel’s phrase. But anyway\, like the economy is released by the combustion engine\, essentially pre-computer economies. And the utopianism there has to do with\, Wow\, look what we can make. We can make new textures\, new colors\, new experiences in the world\, it’s this it’s a kind of a radically and arrogantly humanist utopianism\, associated with those those things. And while it was like the sorcerer’s apprentice kind of went crazy and got out of hand. And it is nonetheless\, I think\, something that you can read as a positive balance as well. Because if you can invent and make and circulate\, throughout the world in a period of 50 years\, is this entirely new substance that changes the the geologic record that introduces\, plastiglomerates where there were none before then you can do other things as well. Right. There is a kind of capacity\, human capacity to invent\, that’s that and that plastic is an effective and a sign of. And I think there are ways to kind of read that utopianism\, which is kind of out of fashion\, I guess I would say into that or out of that substance as well and can recall the the force of our of our own technical abilities and so on. And just like\, there’s a utopian face\, I think\, to like the pandemic\, although of course\, it brought us lots of new plastic waste in the form of masks and gloves\, etc. But part of the utopian thesis you realize like\, Oh yeah\, all of these systems can change. Some of them\, like on a dime\, you can change transport systems. You can change the principles of public that govern public life. You can change the ways that you encounter each other or that you organize your leisure or that you organize your work experience and so on. Those things are not written in stone. The the well known difficulties of getting\, massive numbers of people to cooperate and something that a minority feels is crucial. You know\, those difficulties can be overcome. And so there’s a we just did it\, you know. And\, people complain and blah blah blah. It’s not without strife\, but there’s a utopian aspect to our capacity to\, alter the world. There’s a utopian aspect to anthropogenic changes in that sense. So I think that’s that’s something also that plastic kind of contains as as an option is a kind of knowledge about about malleability\, the continuing malleability of social practice on a global scale. So I guess I would want to think about that include that repertoire of ideas in any conversation about futurity. \nGOOGASIAN [01:21:11]: Yeah\, I think it’s something that unites your comments about utopianism\, here are some of Anne’s comments earlier is this idea that maybe in some ways our utopian thinking about energy is a bit retro\, and that might not be a totally bad thing in the long run. \nIRR [01:21:30]: Well\, you have combined an uneven pieces of development in energy systems\, and you need to be able to layer them all on top of each other. So as you slowly disengage from\, from coal\, for instance\, you shift in another registers. Sometimes you have a rapid development\, you leap ahead\, sometimes not enough. I don’t know if other people. Sorry\, I’ll say this one thing. I don’t know if other people have followed this story about conversions of some of the old British coal mines that have been out of use since the 80s into geothermal energy production sites\, I just think that’s what a cool example of a infrastructure conversion project of green infrastructure because infrastructure can just like sit around and be ruins\, but can also be converted and transformed in a way that’s not just like the depressing cover up\, like making a park out of a pipeline\, passageway. But but you can actually use…flip the way that you think about what that piece of infrastructure is and the capacity that it contains in these interesting ways. So I think they’re like functional utopian conversions also. \nIHEKA [01:22:49]: Yeah\, so very quickly\, I wanted to say that one of the things about futurity is the ability to lead potential for creativity and imagination. But it’s also useful to be in mind that the future is unknowable\, really. I’m thinking about the examples in the 20th century and the utopianism about plastics and how that has turned out today. So I think we want to leave room for contingency aware that we would never really know\, or would never fully know what the future would look like. But again\, that is not an excuse not to try\, but it’s important for us to keep that in view to imagine our ecological future. \nGOOGASIAN [01:23:44]: All right\, well\, since we only have a few minutes left in our in our scheduled time here\, I think let’s all go ahead and hand it over to my colleague Trish\, who’ll share with us some of the questions from our webinar audience here. \nTRISH KAHLE [01:24:01]: And thank you so much\, and thanks to everyone for a really fascinating conversation. In some ways\, you know\, we sort of pre-staged Peter Martin’s question here in the comments about the future. And so since we’ve just discussed that a bit\, I’m going to move on and we have two other sets of questions. And so one I think relates to sort of the metaphors that we’re using to thinking about the relationship between oil and plastics. And that’s about sort of not just sort of being wrapped around the body\, but also seeping into the body\, right\, bringing back particular kinds of toxicity. And so here\, there’s a question here about the violence of oil and you could whether we could discuss the direct localized health implications of oil extraction. And similarly\, right sort of more broadly thinking about not just oil in the context of the Niger Delta\, but also thinking about petrochemicals and other forms of seepage from from plastics and energy infrastructure that have entered our bodies in particular ways. And so since I know that Cajetan has to leave first because he very generously came before teaching\, I’ll sort of asking to start us off and then hopefully we’ll have time to also address Bob’s question in the chat as well. \nIHEKA [01:25:25]: Yeah\, thank you so much for that. In the Niger Delta\, which is the region where I’ve worked\, I think they have different kind of projects imagined to think about the impact of oil. You know\, there is a project Curse of the Black Gold by Michael Watt and Ed Kashi\, it is a multimedia project. And part of it include images of people that have been burnt from fires\, from fire evolving from oil spill in Niger Delta. So you\, you have you have that. There are some that some oral projects to the Niger Delta\, talking about the impact on of oil on women\, on fertility\, or example\, on fertility\, on cancer. But part of the challenge of such projects is also that this the oil company and their promoters they find a way of trying to sow doubt\, trying to ask cause I’ve really proven that this is a direct cause that oil is the direct cause of this. There are problems in Niger environment that’s responsible for some of these problems. Yes. So yes\, the short answer is yes. You know that different forms of projects in different genres trying to capture. But there is a problem of representation too\, for the women\, for the people suffering from cancer. You know\, we it takes time to detect in places like Niger Delta and Nigeria more broadly and even when they do\, until\, towards a terminal stage. It’s not really visible on the body. So that’s a question of problem of representation we’re talking about earlier becomes an issue. But there weren’t fire the victims are fire born\, and that’s really that’s the most dominant trope of representation of oil\, oil issues in the Niger Delta. \nKAHLE [01:27:33]: And I think this question was also directed at you\, Caren\, as well as thinking about petrochemicals and plastics. \nIRR [01:27:41]: Sure. Well\, I guess I was sort of rolling around in my mind and a few examples of narratives because I’m a literature person\, that’s mostly what I have in my mind. Although there’s interesting film things too that are the to follow through on the toxicities\, which it seems to me there’s all kinds of interesting toxicity narratives. I think the question partly had to do with DDT in particular\, which is famously the subject of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring touched\, a crucial touchstone text for any account of American environmental writing and much discussed and kind of thought through. The toxicities\, more recent kind of toxicities narratives that I can think of. They don’t all trace back to the petrochemical extraction processes\, but they’re interested sort of more in these mediating roles. And for some reason\, really blanking on the title of Ruth Ozeki’s novel\, the one that’s about potatoes. It’s it’s has a it’s. \nGOOGASIAN [01:28:49]: All Over Creation. \nIRR [01:28:51]: That’s one. Thank you. Yeah\, that would be a good one to consider in this vein again about pesticides. I think about that book every time I peel a potato\, especially a burbank potato. They’re all clones\, it turns out. So that’s interesting in itself. You know\, so there are these kinds of narratives and a few few others that are going to come back to me in a second. I mean\, certainly you have your kind of Erin Brockovich type projects as well and so on. So I think there are toxicity narratives that are interested\, especially in cancer and cancer clusters\, which is\, cellular level. Joyce Carol Oates has a book about Love Canal\, and that would be interesting there. Building over a waste site\, superfund site\, building housing complex there. So I think that it’s. There is scholarship about illness and the role of the ill body\, Heather Houser’s book on environmental illness is really good on the subject and I think ways in which we have like the the toxic infused human body\, not the monstrous one. You know\, like there were all of these concerns about kind of nuclear monstrosity monster babies\, in the wake of Three Mile Island and so on. But of the\, kind of tragically damaged body created by the exposure to toxicities. Todd Haynes’s Safe\, the film Safe\, would be\, is also a good one of relating to the kind of psychological breakdown that comes with constantly envisioning\, your own future in intoxification. So there’s there’s lots of great resources to work with. And if that’s the question\, there’s interest. Fantastic. I think there’s a lot of take up. What I’m interested in is why the. Why we don’t have a kind of coming together of all of these different micro-level or local toxicities into a big picture account of\, their genesis and that’s that seems like it’s been harder to produce. So even if you think about superfund sites like\, these state funded federal funded projects to renovate areas that were completely poisoned and become unusable\, often through corporate pollution and seepage of oil related and other chemicals that are belong in the Earth. The sites are all separate\, they’re all treated as separate entities. And I think what we what we need is a mapping and an interconnectivity of those sites\, a kind of narrative that allows them to be pulled together into a common story. So that any project that can do that\, I agree\, would be really valuable. \nKAHLE [01:32:13] So\, I am going to give Anne a second to come back in just a second\, but I just wanted to note that Cajetan had to leave to go to teach but we’ll go ahead and sort of wrap ourselves up here\, but I just want to explain why he suddenly disappeared from the webinar. Anne of course\, I sort of had the floor over to you. And then maybe as a final way of wrap up\, we’ll come back to Bob Johnson’s question here about sort of threading the needle in particular pieces of works of art or pieces of literature that you can do. \nPASEK [01:32:48]: Yeah. So on the subject of toxics\, I would venture that you’ll find some interesting and different stuff if you look at the literature and science and technology studies. So books like Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds\, by Sara Ann Wylie are really great. You could also look at Michelle Murphy’s work and Max Libiron. Well\, it seems like there are people thinking across forms of petroleum extraction\, processing and their chemical afterlives or “alterlives”\, as Murphy says. That that are not only like\, very\, very doing good work at sort of drawing connections and thinking about what forms of politics and esthetics are helpful in that conjuncture. But also sort of like\, helping us maybe get over the the purity shock rate of of how do we have our our reaction where we sort of get get through the fact that\, this is a significant shift in in where we mark the boundaries of of clean and dirty or\, contaminated and not. And if we are all to some degree and to very importantly\, differential degrees\, but but to some degree\, all contaminated\, where then do we begin towards building that better future. And on that note\, right\, the subject the prompt about like what some interesting pieces of work have been for thinking towards that. I’ll just make the pitch that it’s it’s good to play around with renewable energy technologies and see how they work. And there are tons of projects that are sort of maker projects or related art projects that are interested in sort of thinking about the rhythms and affects and feelings of solar and wind. I’ve talked a bit about the Solar Protocol website. I think it’s lovely. Branch Magazine is a publication that’s put out by\, I think\, the Mozilla Foundation in part. And they they do the fun thing of they will serve you different esthetics based on the carbon intensity of your local grid. And that’s a changes by the hour. So if you find yourself surfing the internet during peak energy demand time\, you will get image descriptions. But if you come back. In my case\, in Ontario\, during lighter periods where there’s less gas peakers on the grid and it is more nuclear\, solar and wind\, then I will get full images. And it just seems like there there are ways of sort of joining together esthetics\, everyday life and and these cultural idioms to sort of prompt awareness to how energy moves through our worlds\, our our global ecosystems and our day to day energy systems\, as well as like\, what kinds of esthetics might be inappropriate opening for for sort of living more deeply with different kinds of energy forms. And that\, again\, I keep coming back to esthetics less as a sort of critical tool and more as a sort of activist lure\, right. I think it’s a way of bringing people into a project\, making them excited to think new thoughts. And it could be in that kind of generative spirit rather than one purely of just like\, aesthetic critique that we might embark on a new journey. So I’ll leave it there. Thanks. Thanks all for the rich discussion. \nKAHLE [01:36:17]: And I am so sorry that we have to sort of end it here. I do want to if there are any colleagues listening\, I really do encourage using the\, Making Energy Strange work in class. My students worked with Anne’s work and actually tried to replicate it in their own lives to make energy strange\, and it was an incredibly fun and productive exercise. So I just thank you again to and Caren\, Anne and Cajetan\, as well as my colleagues\, my colleagues\, Vicky and Firat and our colleagues here at CIRS. And thank you again all for joining us. \n			\n			\n\n\nResources \n\n				\n				Books 			\n			\n								\nCajetan Iheka\, Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence\, Agency\, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature. Cambridge University Press\, 2017.\nCajetan Iheka\, African Ecomedia: Network Forms\, Planetary Politics. Duke University Press\, 2021.\nCajetan Iheka (ed.)\, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media. Modern Language Association\, 2021.\nCajetan Iheka (ed.)\,  African Migration Narratives: Politics\, Race\, and Space. Boydell & Brewer\, 2019.\nCaren Irr (ed.)\, Life in Plastic: Artistic Responses to Petromodernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press\, 2021. (forthcoming)\nBob Johnson\, Mineral Rites: An Archaeology of the Fossil Economy. Johns Hopkins University Press\, 2019.\nFredric Jameson\, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell University Press\, 1982\nLeo Marx\, The machine in the garden : technology and the pastoral ideal in America. Oxford University Press\, 1964\nMichael Marder\, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. Columbia University Press\, 2013.\nHeather Houser\, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect\, Columbia University Press\, 2016\nSara Ann Wylie\, Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds\, Duke University Press\, 2018.\n\n			\n						\n				Articles  			\n			\n								\nAnne Pasek. “Carbon Vitalism: Life and the Body in Climate Denial.” Environmental Humanities 13\, no. 1 (2021): 1-20.\n\n			\n						\n				Monograpghs/ Novels/ Poetry 			\n			\n								\nFixing Carbon: Mediating Matter in a Warming World – Anne Pasek (forthcoming)\nGain: A Novel – by Richard Powers\nAnatomic – by Adam Dickinson\nThe Age of Plastic – by Craig Santos\nThe First Men in the Moon – by H.G. Wells\nEveryday Oil: Energy Infrastructures and Places That Have Yet to Become Strange – by Anne Pasek\nSilent Spring – by Rachel Carson\nAll Over Creation – by Ruth Ozeki\nThe Falls –  by Joyce Carol Oates\nBranch Magazine\n\n			\n						\n				Podcasts 			\n			\n								\nThe Cultural Lives of Oil –  with Santiago Acosta\nOil\, State\, and Violence – with Victor Ehikhamenor\n\n			\n						\n				Projects/ Films 			\n			\n								\nSolar Protocol \nBlow Up (1966) – by Michelangelo Antonioni\nCurse of the Black Gold: 50 Years Of Oil In The Niger Delta – by Michael Watts\nSafe (1995) – by Todd Haynes
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/energy-aesthetics-new-directions-in-studying-the-cultural-life-of-oil/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:American Studies,Environmental Studies,Panels,Regional Studies
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20211121T124500
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20211121T134500
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20211206T101642Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240313T132325Z
UID:10001453-1637498700-1637502300@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:It's Getting Hot in Here: Changing Climate Change
DESCRIPTION:On November 21\, 2021\, GU-Q students presented their research on international systems for managing global climate change at a hybrid CURA Lunch Talk titled\, “It’s Getting Hot in Here: Changing Climate Change.”  Six first-year students represented the group work of their classmates and covered topics on: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)\, IPCC 6th assessment report\, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Council of the Parties (COPs)\, Qatar’s position on climate change management\, and COP26. \n\n	\n						\n						\n					\n											\n		\n		\n			\n					\n\n			\n					\n								\n						\n					\n											\n		\n		\n			\n					\n\n			\n					\n								\n						\n					\n											\n		\n		\n			\n					\n\n			\n					\n								\n						\n					\n											\n		\n		\n			\n					\n\n			\n					\n								\n						\n					\n											\n		\n		\n			\n					\n\n			\n					\n								\n						\n					\n											\n		\n		\n			\n					\n\n			\n					\n					\n\n\nThe IPCC was described by Hind Al-Mohannadi (class of 2025) as the “Guardian of Climate Science.” As such\, the IPCC produces assessment reports every five to eight years. The IPCC is a coalition of scientists and governments. The core scientists of the IPCC review all of the published climate science literature and produce assessment reports to highlight the areas of consensus in the science. They focus on studies that have a level of consensus of 99 percent or greater\, which means the hypothesized outcome of a study is virtually certain. Maya Al-Kawari (class of 2025) presented the findings of the last IPCC assessment report (Assessment Report 6\, Working Group I). She highlighted a statement of the report according to which it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere\, ocean and land.” She then showed a chart that illustrated the near linear relationship between the cumulative carbon dioxide emissions and global warming for five hypothetical carbon-emission scenarios until the year 2050. The chart shows that the global temperature will undoubtedly increase\, it is only the temperature range that remains to be seen based on how effective actions to reduce carbon emissions are taken now (see figure 1 below). \n\nSource: IPCC AR 6 Working Group 1\n\nAnother international body relating to climate change is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Samantha Facun (class of 2025) explained that this is a monitoring and reviewing group consisting of 197 parties\, including all UN member states and the European Union (EU). The COP is an annual gathering of the parties in which they try to work towards joint agreements or protocols to address the impacts of climate change. For example\, the Kyoto Protocol\, adopted in 1997 and fully ratified in 2005 aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by five percent over five years. The Paris Agreement (2015) is another example of an outcome from a COP\, in which signatories pledged to limit warming to no more than two degrees Celsius\, with a preferred temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Some parties form alliances to better lobby for their particular interests\, for example\, the Alliance of Small Island States\, the High Ambition Coalition\, and the Arab States. Unfortunately\, data shows that the agreements that come out of COP meetings are very limited in their effectiveness (see figure 2 below). \n\nSource: International Energy Agency\n\nMoving further in to the view of Qatar in particular\, Pei Ying Tsai (class of 2025) presented an overall picture of Qatar’s position toward the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto Protocol\, to which Qatar is a signatory. Consistent with global trends\, Qatar’s greenhouse emissions did not decrease after the Kyoto Protocol or Paris Agreement came into effect. Qatar\, a small state\, ranks number thirty-eight globally in amount of carbon dioxide emitted based on its territorial size. However\, Qatar ranks number one globally in terms of carbon dioxide emissions per capita. On the positive side\, relative to the rest of the GCC\, Qatar’s climate debt (the debt owed by developed countries to developing countries for the damage caused by their disproportionately large contributions to climate change) has decreased significantly more than the other Gulf countries. In the recent COP26\, Qatar pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by twenty-five percent by 2030 – a mere nine years from now. It is planning to do this through significant actions taken in the areas of infrastructure and transport\, water and waste management\, and awareness. \n\nConcluding the presentation\, Angelo Castiello (class of 2025)\, highlighted the limitations of COP26 and the international systems for managing climate change. Climate change faces a notorious “free rider” problem\, with poor commitment from the greatest emitters of greenhouse gases\, which are also the richest countries. The COP delegates are countries\, but also industries. Notably\, the COP26 delegates associated with fossil fuel industries outnumbered the national delegations (see figure 3 below). \n\nSource: Global Witness\, BBC\n\nThe overall takeaway message from the event is that despite the international attention towards and efforts to assuage global warming and the impacts of climate change\, international agreements and governmental proclamations are not going to be enough. We as individuals must make the collective decisions in our daily lives that have potential for lasting impact. \n\nArticle by: Elizabeth Wanucha\, CIRS Operations Manager
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/its-getting-hot-in-here-changing-climate-change/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:American Studies,Environmental Studies,Panels,Regional Studies,Student Engagement
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20211021T140000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20211021T160000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20211110T070532Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230504T095208Z
UID:10001446-1634824800-1634832000@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:CURA Workshop: Methodology and Bias: Reflections from Food Security Research in Ethiopia
DESCRIPTION:On October 21\, 2021\, CIRS hosted a CURA workshop titled\, “Methodology and Bias: Reflections from Food Security Research in Ethiopia” led by Professor Logan Cochrane\, Associate Professor in the College of Public Policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar. Via interactive exercises and group discussions\, Cochrane guided thirteen GUQ and NUQ students to reflect on questions of power and their own positionality as researchers. One of the aims of the workshop was to demonstrate how food distribution and production is a politicized process that involves multiple actors with varying levels of decision-making power. \n\nDuring the interactive group discussions\, students were encouraged to think like policymakers and engage with datasets from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organizations to identify which decisions such surveys would enable them to make. Cochrane explained how both food security scholars and practitioners agree that equitable\, transparent\, and rigorous research methods inform decisions. He underlined how qualitative methods can complement quantitative data and explained how to choose which method is more suitable according to the size and scope of a research project. \n\n	\n						\n						\n					\n											\n		\n		\n			\n					\n\n			\n					\n								\n						\n					\n											\n		\n		\n			\n					\n\n			\n					\n								\n						\n					\n											\n		\n		\n			\n					\n\n			\n					\n								\n						\n					\n											\n		\n		\n			\n					\n\n			\n					\n								\n						\n					\n											\n		\n		\n			\n					\n\n			\n					\n								\n						\n					\n											\n		\n		\n			\n					\n\n			\n					\n					\n\n\nDrawing on examples from his research on food security amongst rural Ethiopian farmers\, Cochrane demonstrated the strengths and limitations of survey research and proposed how new\, community-centered methods are more suitable for studying the lived realities of local communities. He highlighted how local engagements and interactions enabled his research team to gain insight into how rainfall patterns\, debt\, and migration—factors often not discernable in macro-trends in quantitative research—impact local patterns and behaviors. While survey research studies macro-level trends\, a community-centered approach zooms in on the lived realities of people\, producing nuanced data and analysis. Specifically\, a knowledge co-production approach through questions\, conversations\, and interactions at the community level helps discern hidden patterns and behaviors\, providing valuable data to support development programs in rural areas. Cochrane demonstrated the importance of studying sub-national trends in order to understand and address local challenges. \n\n\n“The session was extremely engaging – I felt involved throughout and it was unlike what I had expected. The material about knowledge co-production has really caught my attention. Its utilization in working together with local stakeholders to capture and produce novel and nuanced data seems to me as an interesting methodology which I am trying to learn more about.”  \n– Pragyan Acharya\, class of 2024.  \n\nIn conclusion\, Cochrane argued that researchers are not apolitical and thus need to engage responsibly with local communities. He explained that the strength of community-centered methods is how it involves local actors as partners in co-producing knowledge. Ultimately\, he argued\, the key research question is determined by these interactions. Cochrane reminded students about bias and the need for research that is inclusive and comprehensive that\, “When one does not ask certain questions\, then that data becomes invisible.” This reinforces the significance of using the appropriate research method for a compelling research project. \n\nArticle by Khushboo Shah\, senior at GUQ
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/cura-workshop-methodology-and-bias-reflections-from-food-security-research-in-ethiopia/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:Student Engagement
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/11/featured-image_CURA_Oct21.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Qatar:20211018T183000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Qatar:20211018T200000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20211021T115733Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240313T132419Z
UID:10001445-1634581800-1634587200@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:Reducing Islamophobic Attitudes? The Effect of Mohamed Salah and the World Cup 2022
DESCRIPTION:On October 18\, 2021\, CIRS hosted a webinar titled “Reducing Islamophobic Attitudes? The Effect of Mohamed Salah and the World Cup 2022” by Salma Mousa\, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University and a Georgetown University in Qatar alumna (Class of 2012). The talk was part of the CIRS lecture series under the “Building a Legacy: The Qatar FIFA World Cup 2022” research initiative. Mousa’s talk was based on previous research she conducted with her colleagues Ala’ Alrababa’h\, Will Marble\, and Alexander Siegel\, titled “Can Exposure to Celebrities Reduce Prejudice? Estimating the Effect of Mohamed Salah on Islamophobic Attitudes and Behaviors\,” which was published in the American Political Science Review in 2021. \n\nMousa’s lecture revolved around answering a central research question: “Can exposure to celebrities from stigmatized groups reduce prejudice?” In order to address this\, Mousa and her research partners took the elite Egyptian soccer player Mohamed Salah as a case study in an attempt to quantify his effects on reducing Islamophobia. Salah was used as a case study\, not only because he is one of the world’s most successful contemporary football players\, but because he declares his Islamic faith in a public manner\, both on and off the pitch. \n\nIn order to test their central hypothesis\, Mousa and her colleagues approached the topic through a “contact theory” lens\, which was first presented by Gordon Allport in relation to racial segregation in the United States. The theory states that contact across group lines can reduce prejudice under certain conditions\, such as when this contact places people on equal footing\, when it is endorsed by communal authorities and social norms\, and\, most importantly\, when the contact involves people cooperating for a common goal. These kinds of contacts across group lines is well suited to building understanding and friendships\, and\, ultimately\, to reducing prejudice. \n\nUsing data on hate crime reports throughout England and 15 million tweets from British football fans\, Mousa and her colleagues found that after Salah joined Liverpool F.C.\, hate crimes in the Liverpool area dropped by 16% compared with a synthetic control. In addition\, Liverpool F.C. fans halved their rates of posting anti-Muslim tweets relative to fans of other top-flight clubs. An original survey experiment suggests that the salience of Salah’s Muslim identity enabled positive feelings toward Salah to generalize to Muslims more broadly. Their findings provide support for the parasocial contact hypothesis—indicating that positive exposure to out-group celebrities can spark real-world behavioral changes in prejudice. \n\nAbout the speaker \n\nSalma Mousa is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. An Egyptian scholar of migration\, conflict\, and social cohesion\, Salma typically partners with governments and NGOs in the Middle East and beyond to explore these questions. Her research has been published in Science and the American Political Science Review\, and profiled by The Economist and PBS NOVA. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University in 2020\, and her BSFS in International Politics from Georgetown University in Qatar.
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/reducing-islamophobic-attitudes-the-effect-of-mohamed-salah-and-the-world-cup-2022/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:American Studies,Dialogue Series,FIFA World Cup Series,Race & Society,Regional Studies
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210930T190000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210930T203000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20211017T073251Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240313T132401Z
UID:10001214-1633028400-1633033800@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:Activism in Exile: Diasporic Communities in the Wake of the Arab Uprisings
DESCRIPTION:The Arab uprisings\, which saw the mobilization of millions of citizens across the Middle East and North Africa\, produced new exiled communities at a massive scale. Refugees made their way to countries all over the world\, escaping economic pressures\, political repression and state violence. In host countries\, the new (and old) diasporic communities have often exercised what scholars define as “voice after exit.” Enabling conditions in the host state can allow for new forms of social and political mobilization and solidarity-building that are difficult to achieve under repressive regimes at home. But anti-regime diaspora activism after the onset of the 2011 Arab uprisings demonstrates that combating authoritarianism from afar is a challenging and complex phenomenon. Regimes have increasingly demonstrated a determination and capacity to repress diaspora activism through relying on their own formal and informal transnational networks of supporters. Middle Eastern diasporic communities are also far from homogenous\, as their experiences\, conditions\, identities\, agendas\, interests and organizational forms may vary widely. Polarization among Middle Eastern diasporas is rife. Diasporas’ capacity to mobilize successfully and play an influential role is also highly dependent on the political and social conditions in their host state. \n\nThis panel of scholars\, activists\, and practitioners seeks to explore the demography of these recent diasporas\, their forms of community organization\, and modes of political mobilization. Among other things\, this panel asks what is “new” about these recently formed exiled communities\, especially in light of the historical legacies of political organization by diaspora communities since the latter half of the twentieth century. The panel also seeks to explore the role of the state in two contexts. How do local political and socioeconomic conditions in the host states as well as the changing contours of authoritarianism in the countries of origin impact the forms of mobilization that these communities have pursued in recent years? Other themes to be explored include changing notions of political agency and citizenship rights\, the role of transnational networks and civil society organizations\, the impact of digital communication technologies\, transformations in youth culture among exiled communities\, and identifying new ideological and intellectual trends within diaspora communities. \n\n\n\n\n\nFeaturing\n\nNoha Aboueldahab is a nonresident fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings and a fellow at the Brookings Doha Center. She is an award-winning specialist in transitional justice and the author of Transitional Justice and the Prosecution of Political Leaders in the Arab Region: A comparative study of Egypt\, Libya\, Tunisia and Yemen (Hart\, 2017). Her most recent Brookings piece discusses how Western policymakers can engage the new Arab diasporas. Her forthcoming book examines the role of the new Arab diasporas in transitional justice and accountability. Aboueldahab is Co-Chair of the Transitional Justice and Rule of Law Interest Group at the American Society of International Law. \n\nNadwa Al-Dawsari is a researcher\, conflict practitioner\, and policy analyst with over 20 years of field experience in peacebuilding\, nonprofit management\, and conflict-sensitive development. Areas of expertise include business development\, managing organizational start-up and growth\, program assessment and evaluation\, conflict analysis\, tribes and informal governance\, nonstate armed actors\, and security sector reform.   \n\nDana Moss is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California\, Irvine. Her research and teaching focus on collective resistance against repression\, authoritarianism\, revolutions; transnational activism\, diasporas\, immigrants; and the Middle Eastern region. Her current book project\, The Arab Spring Abroad\, investigates how and to what extent anti-regime diaspora activists in the US and Great Britain mobilized to support the 2011 uprisings in Libya\, Syria\, and Yemen. Her next book project will examine how and why members of military institutions resist participating in state- sanctioned violence. To date\, her work has been published in venues such as the American Sociological Review\, Social Forces\, Social Problems\, Mobilization: An International Journal\, and Comparative Migration Studies. She comes to the University of Notre Dame from the University of Pittsburgh (2016-20)\, where she was awarded the 2020 David and Tina Bellet Excellence in Teaching Award. \n\nLea Muller-Funk is a Research Fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies\, where her research focuses on migration aspirations and drivers in (forced) migration\, migration governance\, and diaspora politics with a geographical focus on the Middle East\, North Africa and Europe. Previously\, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam and a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. Muller-Funk earned a joint PhD in Comparative Politics and Arabic Studies (summa cum laude) from the Centre des Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po Paris and the Department for Near Eastern Studies at Vienna University in 2016.  \n\nAbdullah Al-Arian (Moderator) is an associate professor of History at Georgetown University in Qatar. He received his doctorate in History from Georgetown University and his master’s degree in Sociology of Religion from the London School of Economics and his BA in Political Science from Duke University. He is editor of the “Critical Currents in Islam” page on the Jadaliyya e-zine. He is also a frequent contributor to the Al-Jazeera English network and website. His first book\, entitled Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. Professor Al-Arian teaches introductory courses on the history of the Middle East\, as well as advanced topics courses covering the history of modern Egypt\, Islamic social movements\, and the history of US policy towards the Middle East. \n\nSami Hermez (Moderator) is the director of the Liberal Arts Program and associate professor in residence of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar. His research focuses on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon\, and his broader concerns include the study of social movements\, the state\, memory\, security\, and human rights in the Arab World. Hermez has held posts as visiting scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University\, visiting professor of Contemporary International Issues at the University of Pittsburgh\, visiting professor of anthropology at Mt. Holyoke College\, and postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Lebanese Studies\, St. Antony’s College\, Oxford University. His professional experience includes work with the United Nations Capital Development Fund and World Bank in New York and Sana’a\, Yemen\, as well as a stint with the UN Development Program in Beirut. At NU-Q he teaches classes in anthropology that include topics such as violence\, gender and anthropology in the Middle East. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University.
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/activism-in-exile-diasporic-communities-in-the-wake-of-the-arab-uprisings/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:American Studies,Distingushed Lectures,Regional Studies
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/09/Activism-in-Exile-2-1.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210921T170000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210921T190000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20211007T064538Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240313T132406Z
UID:10001212-1632243600-1632250800@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education Virtual Working Group VI
DESCRIPTION:On September 21\, 2021\, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) hosted the final paper workshop under its research initiative\, The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education. During the meeting\, two draft papers were presented and comprehensively discussed\, by the convened scholars. \n\nDr. Sarah Steinbock-Pratt\, initiated the group discussion by presenting her paper titled\, “It Is the Work That Counts – Industrial Education in the Philippines.” The paper provided a comprehensive history of industrial education in the Philippines and examined its role and importance as a tool used by the US colonizers to pacify the Filipinos. The author contended that industrial education became a direct way to control the labor and economically develop the Philippines. Though different schooling models were developed for Christians and non-Christians populations\, by 1909-1910 industrial education had become central to the education system in the Philippines and remained so even after the Monroe report. The model of industrial education implemented in the Philippines\, by the US\, had its roots in and was adopted from educations systems developed for Native Americans\, African Americans\, and the Spanish industrial schools. The author argued that the public-school system in the Philippines was connected to other institutions\, such as the penal system that were also attempting to shape and control labor. The Bilibid prison in Manila\, which was established by the Spanish and later taken over by the American colonial state\, utilized the same rhetoric of uplift\, reform\, and tutelage as the public schools\, to control\, discipline\, and direct learning and labor\, among the Filipinos. \n\nDanya Al-Saleh presented her paper titled\, “Technical Petro-Education and the Future of Fossil-Fueled Capitalism in Qatar\,” which looked at a specific technical training program offered by the College of North Atlantic- Qatar (CNA-Q)\, a satellite campus of a Canadian community college in Qatar. The college offers a Technical Certificate Program\, which is designed in partnership with Qatar Petroleum (QP) to prepare Qatari students to work as entry-level technicians for the company. The author placed and contextualized this program within the longer history of technical and vocational education in the Qatar’s oil and gas industry. The paper provided that technical and vocational education has historically been a contested space in Qatar\, particularly as development in the country depends on immigrant labor. Al-Saleh argues that the underlying contradiction in CNAQ/QP’s program is that it is designed to produce Qatari manual labor for the oil and gas industry in an era when the country’s ruling class are promoting education as a mechanism for producing Qataris who will manage and innovate a future knowledge economy. She examined two ways in which this contradiction in the contemporary moment reveals unresolved conflicts over technical petro-education in Qatar; the complex relationship between national and “foreign” technical labor and the clash of capitalism with the reforms to encourage transferability and upward mobility for the program’s students. \n\nFrom May to September 2021\, CIRS hosted five paper workshops for authors to present their draft chapters and receive commentary from the group. CIRS plans to publish these research papers in an edited collection in the near future. \n\nFor the meeting agenda\, click here.For the participants’ biographies\, click here.For the research initiative\, click here.\n\nParticipants and Discussants: \n\nElif Ekin Akşit\, Ankara University\, TurkeyMaram Al-Qershi\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarDanya Al-Saleh\, University of Wisconsin–MadisonHossein Ayazi\, Williams CollegeZahra Babar\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarMisba Bhatti\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarOliver Charbonneau\, University of GlasgowMishal Khan\, The University of Texas AustinArun Kumar\, University of NottinghamJanne Laht\, University of HelsinkiSuzi Mirgani\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarDolf-Alexander Neuhaus\, Free Berlin UniversitySarah Steinbock-Pratt\, University of AlabamaKarine Walther\, Georgetown University in QatarElizabeth Wanucha\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarHelge Wendt\, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) BerlinClyde Wilcox\, Georgetown University in Qatar\n\nArticle by Misba Bhatti\, Research Analyst at CIRS
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/the-gospel-of-work-and-money-global-histories-of-industrial-education-virtual-working-group-vi/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:American Studies,Regional Studies
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/10/WS_Sept-21_Smaller.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210713T170000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210713T193000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20210801T061659Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240313T132413Z
UID:10001210-1626195600-1626204600@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education Virtual Working Group V
DESCRIPTION:The Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) convened the fifth virtual workshop under its research initiative\, The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education\, on July 13\, 2021. During this workshop\, three project contributors presented their draft papers and received in-depth feedback from the group. \n\nThe group discussion was initiation by Dolf-Alexander Neuhaus\, who presented his article titled\, “Industrial Education in Korea from the 1880s to the 1930s.” The chapter looks at the evolution of industrial education in Korea while it was under Japanese colonial rule. The author argues that during this period a multilayered education system existed in Korea. The industrial education model was built by the missionaries and the YMCA\, to instill Koreans with a Protestant work ethic and teach them about industrial labor and capitalism. However\, many of the Korean nationalist leaders who had converted to Christianity\, saw industrialization as a requirement to attain “civilization and enlightenment” or “self-strengthening.” Using a variety of sources\, such as the writings of Korean educators\, missionary reports as well as official colonial documents\, Neuhaus aims to explore how the missionary efforts for industrial education and colonial education policy are interconnected. The chapter will examine the industrial education policies set up by the Japanese colonial government\, as well as look at the private learning facilities set up by the YMCA in Korea during the early decades of the 20th century. \n\nLukas Alleman’s chapter titled “Boarding School Education in the Soviet Arctic – Rationalizing and Industrializing Away Indigenous Livelihoods\,” examines the Soviet Union’s industrial educational efforts targeting indigenous Arctic communities. The author suggests that there are ideological commonalities between modern ‘Western’ nations and the Soviet State when it comes to the treatment of indigenous communities\, and their assimilation and integration via educational systems. The paper draws on ethnographic material to provide an empirically-based account of the Sámi\, in the Kola Peninsula\, who in multiple ways were impacted by different forms of state efforts to mainstream them into Soviet economic life. These development policies among others included intensified boarding schooling of the indigenous children which almost never played out as originally intended and contributed to urbanizing indigenous livelihoods and dissolving family structures. \n\nHossein Ayazi presented the last paper titled\, “Plantation Pedagogies\, Counterrevolutionary Geographies: Agricultural Development\, Industrial Education\, and Firestone Natural Rubber Co.” The chapter looks at the changing nature of U.S.-Liberia relations and the work of Firestone Natural Rubber Company within the independent West African republic in order to trace the specific social processes of reproduction that helped restage colonial possession\, plantation dispossession\, and differentially racialized devaluation toward the emerging terms of international finance and development under U.S. leadership. Using Booker Washington Agricultural and Industrial Institute (BWI)\, which was founded in 1929 in Kakata\, Liberia\, as a case study\, the author details United States’ agricultural education and manual training efforts within Liberia and argues that by the mid-20th century\, the “gospel of work and money” professed by U.S. business leaders\, state officials\, reformers\, social scientists and others became the gospel of national independence\, economic internationalism\, and bureaucratic rationality\, thus containing the convergent anti-colonial and anti-capitalist insurgences that characterized the agrarian periphery of the U.S. and European empires across the first half of the 20th century. \n\nThe last paper workshop for the project will be held in Fall 2021. \n\nFor the meeting agenda\, click here.For the participants’ biographies\, click here.For the research initiative\, click here.\n\nParticipants and Discussants: \n\nElif Ekin Akşit\, Ankara University\, TurkeyMaram Al-Qershi\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarLukas Alleman\, University of LaplandHossein Ayazi\, Williams CollegeZahra Babar\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarJulia Bates\, Sacred Heart UniversityMisba Bhatti\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarOliver Charbonneau\, University of GlasgowBronwen Everill\, University of CambridgeMishal Khan\, The University of Texas AustinArun Kumar\, University of NottinghamSuzi Mirgani\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarDolf-Alexander Neuhaus\, Free Berlin UniversityKarine Walther\, Georgetown University in QatarHelge Wendt\, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) Berlin\n\nArticle by Misba Bhatti\, Research Analyst at CIRS
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/the-gospel-of-work-and-money-global-histories-of-industrial-education-virtual-working-group-v/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:American Studies,CIRS Faculty Research Workshops,Race & Society,Regional Studies
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/07/1920x450-3.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210629T170000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210629T193000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20210707T064725Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240313T132445Z
UID:10001207-1624986000-1624995000@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education Virtual Working Group IV
DESCRIPTION:On June 29\, 2021\, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) convened the fourth virtual workshop under its research initiative on The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education. During this paper workshop\, three project contributors presented their draft papers and received in-depth feedback from the group. \n\nDr. Arun Kumar initiated the discussion with the presentation of his paper titled\, “Christian Labour and the Cawnpore Mission Industrial School.” The chapter traces the history of the Cawnpore Mission Industrial School and examines the detailed relationship that Christian missionaries in India developed with labor and industries in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Cawnpore School belonged to the Society for the Propagation of Gospels in Foreign Parts (SPG)\, which was a missionary society of the Church of England and had a significant presence in the British Empire. The Cawnpore Industrial School along with providing special industrial courses trained Christian converts into industrious and useful workers and disciplined them to become modern workers. Kumar proposes to explore the industrial school’s mission\, which was an institution part of what Christian missionaries called ‘industrial mission/work’. The author argues that these schools were the practical results of the close nexus of colonial Christianity\, capitalism\, and native labor. Using the Cawnpore Mission Industrial School as a case study the author plans to unfold this argument through a local history of the school. \n\nDr. Mishal Khan and Zahra Babar presented the next paper titled\, “(Im)mobile and (Un)skilled: The Paradox of Technical Education and the Pakistani Migrant in the Gulf.” In this chapter\, the authors situate contemporary forms of labor migration within the longer history of capitalism connecting South Asia and the Gulf. Colonial era practices around the distribution and reallocation of labor and methods of disciplining and training docile workforces were rooted in particular racial imaginings and valuations of South Asian workers. Providing a case study of Pakistan’s current efforts to “upskill” their citizenry through technical education and thus enhance their chances for success in the Gulf\, the authors draw connections between the present and past marginalized role of the South Asian workers\, paying attention to the colonial and postcolonial policies and infrastructures that have maintained these valuations even while purporting to condemn them.  \n\nDr. Christine Whyte presented the last paper of the workshop\, titled\, ““He looks wistfully at shore”: empire\, slavery and the training of boys on-board the HMS Mars\, 1869-1929.” The article details the history and experiences of the children who were recruited to live and serve on-board the HMS Mars\, a certified industrial school “training ship” in Dundee\, Scotland. Dr. Whyte writes that the policy of confining destitute\, and criminally sentenced children to a residential training ship emerged from three different trends in Victorian Britain: carceral\, philanthropic\, and imperial. There is an interconnection between poverty\, criminalization\, and empire\, which can be seen in the function and form of the industrial school created in Britain and the creation and maintenance of a reformatory system of ‘training for empire’ which used criminally charged poor children as enforcers of imperial power globally. The chapter will attempt to uncover some of the carceral and imperial influences on industrial education for poor and homeless boys in Scotland. Dr. Whyte states that the paper will try to shed light on the experiences of the children that served on the ship\, the views of their parents\, as well as the home communities\, as these have remained obscure. \n\nThe next paper workshop for the project is scheduled to take place in July\, in which three additional contributors will present and discuss their draft papers. \n\nFor the meeting agenda\, click here.For the participants’ biographies\, click here.For the research initiative\, click here.\n\nParticipants and Discussants: \n\nMaram Al-Qershi\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarHossein Ayazi\, Williams CollegeZahra Babar\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarJulia Bates\, Sacred Heart UniversityMisba Bhatti\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarOliver Charbonneau\, University of GlasgowBronwen Everill\, University of CambridgeMishal Khan\, The University of Texas AustinArun Kumar\, University of NottinghamSuzi Mirgani\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarDolf-Alexander Neuhaus\, Free Berlin UniversitySarah Steinbock-Pratt\, University of AlabamaKarine Walther\, Georgetown University in QatarElizabeth Wanucha\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarHelge Wendt\, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) BerlinChristine Whyte\, University of Glasgow\n\nArticle by Misba Bhatti\, Research Analyst at CIRS
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/the-gospel-of-work-and-money-global-histories-of-industrial-education-virtual-working-group-iv/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:American Studies,CIRS Faculty Research Workshops,Race & Society,Regional Studies
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/07/1920x450-2.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210608T170000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210608T190000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20210616T062349Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240314T072229Z
UID:10001205-1623171600-1623178800@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education Virtual Working Group III
DESCRIPTION:April 13		\n\n					\n				 @ 			\n			\n				1:00 pm			\n		\n									\n					 – 				\n			\n							\n					2:00 pm				\n			\n						 \n\n\nOn June 8\, 2021\, the Center for International and Regional Studies convened a third virtual working group under its research initiative on The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education. During this paper workshop two chapter contributions were presented and discussed\, which received in-depth feedback from the group. \n\nDr. Bronwen Everill\, presented the first paper titled\, ““The Dignity of Labor”: Liberian Industrial Education in West Africa.” The chapter looks at the role of Liberia within West Africa\, as a site of educational innovation and the launch of US state-based missionary and educational enterprises. The author explores the close internal relationship between Liberia and Sierra Leonean and the use of education as a way of maintaining Liberian sovereignty. By the end of the 19th century\, Liberian engineers were training African workers for plantation labor\, domestic housework\, and for skilled and unskilled industrial labor in places as far away as German Togo\, British Nigeria\, and the Belgian Congo. At the start of the 20th century\, Liberians had become part of a mobile class of African engineers\, missionaries\, and educators spreading American values and ideas on the continent. The paper addressed the literature about Liberia and its use of education in their struggle for sovereignty and independence. The author argues that Liberians used whatever means at their disposal to ensure that Liberia was not incorporated into the British or French Empire\, by ensuring their effective control over and domination of the indigenous populations of Liberia. \n\nNext Dr. Helge Wendt presented his paper titled\, “Industrial-Technological Education in Spanish America during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century.” The paper provides a comparative study of early industrial education schools in five Latin American countries i.e. Chile\, Argentina\, Mexico\, Cuba\, and Colombia. These schools of Arts and Trades were opened in the 19th century with the goal of training young men\, and later young women\, in practical and technical fields of production. The author states that the history of industrial education in these countries can be divided into different initiatives related to higher education\, primary education\, professional training\, and further training. In this comparative study\, Wendt wants to understand the school foundations and subsequent reforms in their local\, inter-local\, national and international contexts. School regulations\, teachers and student recruitments play a special role in the analysis of the different developments. Also\, connections of the school with the existing school system and the hopes for stimuli for the economic activity in the respective country will be studied. \n\nThe third paper workshop for the project is scheduled for the end of June\, in which three scholars will present their draft papers and receive commentary. \n\n\nFor the meeting agenda\, click here.\n\n\n\nFor the participants’ biographies\, click here.\n\n\n\nFor the research initiative\, click here.\n\n\nParticipants and Discussants: \n\n\nMaram Al-Qershi\, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar\n\n\n\nDanya Al-Saleh\, University of Wisconsin–Madison\n\n\n\nHossein Ayazi\, Williams College\n\n\n\nZahra Babar\, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar\n\n\n\nJulia Bates\, Sacred Heart University\n\n\n\nMisba Bhatti\, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar\n\n\n\nOliver Charbonneau\, University of Glasgow\n\n\n\nBronwen Everill\, University of Cambridge\n\n\n\nArun Kumar\, University of Nottingham\n\n\n\nSuzi Mirgani\, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar\n\n\n\nDolf-Alexander Neuhaus\, Free Berlin University\n\n\n\nSarah Steinbock-Pratt\, University of Alabama\n\n\n\nKarine Walther\, Georgetown University in Qatar\n\n\n\nElizabeth Wanucha\, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar\n\n\n\nHelge Wendt\, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) Berlin\n\n\nArticle by Misba Bhatti\, Research Analyst at CIRS
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/the-gospel-of-work-and-money-global-histories-of-industrial-education-virtual-working-group-iii/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:American Studies,CIRS Faculty Research Workshops,Race & Society,Regional Studies
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/06/June-8-broad.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210525T170000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210525T190000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20210603T082011Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240314T072235Z
UID:10001203-1621962000-1621969200@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education Virtual Working Group II
DESCRIPTION:On May 25\, 2021\, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University Qatar held the second virtual working group under its research initiative on The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education. This virtual working group was the first in a series of meetings that will be held between May and August 2021\, to present and discuss the chapters contributions for the project. During the May meeting two papers were presented and received feedback and comments from the group. \n\nThe first paper titled\, “American Sociology’s Promotion of the Industrial Education Model and the Reification of Race\,” was presented by Dr. Julia Bates. The paper addresses American sociology’s theoretical promotion of the Industrial Education model. The paper reviews three main sociologists’ use of sociological theory to advocate for the industrial education model. After the first World War\, the U.S. Department of Labor worked with a commercial philanthropic institution called the Phelps Stokes Fund to transfer educational policies designed for African Americans to West Africa and South Africa. The US government used and promoted the industrial education model used at Tuskegee and the Hampton institutes for African American education. This model emphasized manual labor\, Christian character formation\, and political passivity as a form of racial uplift. The model heavily relied upon prominent theories in the sociology of race to propagate this model. Thomas Jesse Jones\, who was the educational director of the Phelps Stokes Fund\, in particular advocated for the transnational development of the model. W.E.B. Du Bois\, a prominent sociologist who was marginalized by the U.S government and American sociology\, critiques this model in his works The Crisis and Darkwater. Bates argues that from the works of Jones and Dubois two different sociological conceptions of race emerge. The author will examine the U.S. state’s decision to link African Americans and Africans as similar objects of political intervention and look at Jones’s use of sociology to promote the model’s effect on sociological theories of race. \n\nDr. Elif Ekin Akşit presented the second paper titled\, “Industrial Education in the Late Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey: Gender\, Egalitarianism\, and Mathematics.” The paper traces the history of industrial schools in the Ottoman Empire and their subsequent continuation in modern Turkey. Dr. Akşit contends that the development of industrial education in the late Ottoman empire and modern Turkey took place within the context of the transformation from an empire to the republic\, and adopting policies and practices of the West became the part and parcel of resisting colonialism. The paper discusses the development of the Girls Industrial Schools in the late Ottoman Empire and their importance in the general development of technical/scientific education and its relation to the ideology. The author proposes to study the question of what it meant to be industrial in the East and West\, as well as trace the continuation of the industrial schools in the late-20th and early 21st centuries. These key queries will be addressed with the help of the data collected from students’ accounts as well as state documents on these schools. The article primarily focuses on the gendered dimension of the industrial schools because the author argues that their continuation in the Turkish republic made these girls’ schools the main pillar for establishing the revolution on the societal level. \n\nCIRS will convene the next paper workshop for the project in June where three additional paper contributions will be presented and discussed. \n\nFor the meeting agenda\, click here.For the participants’ biographies\, click here.For the research initiative\, click here.\n\nParticipants and Discussants: \n\nElif Ekin Akşit\, Ankara University\, TurkeyMaram Al-Qershi\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarDanya Al-Saleh\, University of Wisconsin–MadisonLukas Allemann\, University of LaplandHossein Ayazi\, Williams CollegeZahra Babar\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarJulia Bates\, Sacred Heart UniversityMisba Bhatti\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarJoshua Frank Cárdenas\, California Indian Nations CollegeOliver Charbonneau\, University of GlasgowBronwen Everill\, University of CambridgeArun Kumar\, University of NottinghamJanne Laht\, University of HelsinkiSuzi Mirgani\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarDolf-Alexander Neuhaus\, Free Berlin UniversitySarah Steinbock-Pratt\, University of AlabamaKarine Walther\, Georgetown University in QatarElizabeth Wanucha\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarHelge Wendt\, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) Berlin\n\nArticle by Misba Bhatti\, Research Analyst at CIRS
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/the-gospel-of-work-and-money-global-histories-of-industrial-education-virtual-working-group-ii/
CATEGORIES:American Studies,CIRS Faculty Research Workshops,Race & Society,Regional Studies
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/05/May-25-featured-image.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210419T120000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210419T133000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20210517T122127Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210901T062304Z
UID:10001195-1618833600-1618839000@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:The Impact of Climate Change on Agriculture in South Asia
DESCRIPTION:Agriculture is one of the most vulnerable sectors to the effects of climate change. The change in average temperature\, rainfall\, changes in pests and diseases\, variations in the atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2) and ground-level ozone concentrations\, as well as changes in sea level can have a direct and negative impact on food production and farming communities. Despite technological advances made in the 20th century\, climate change still has a linear and often adverse impact on agricultural productivity. While this is a global phenomenon\, South Asia is one of the most susceptible regions to the effects of climate change. Afghanistan\, Bangladesh\, Bhutan\, India\, Maldives\, Nepal\, Pakistan\, and Sri Lanka together comprise one of the world’s most densely populated regions and are all also highly reliant on agriculture as an economic sector. About 57 percent of South Asia’s landmass is devoted to farming\, while nearly 60 percent of its population is engaged in agricultural production in one form or another. Much of this activity is undertaken by vulnerable small landholders\, while women also play a significant role. According to Food and Agriculture Organization data\, in India\, Pakistan\, Bangladesh\, Nepal\, Sri Lanka\, and Bhutan\, more than 60 percent of women work in the agricultural sector. An increasing population\, natural resource degradation\, and the impact of high rates of poverty means that the region is already contending with food insecurity. This will certainly be amplified to reach critical levels with the anticipated effects of climate change. While direct impacts are associated with the rise in temperatures\, indirect impacts include insufficient availability of water\, due to decline in annual rainfall and inadequate inputs of water\, and changing soil moisture status and pest and disease incidence due to lack of enough fertilizers. The current situation has significantly impacted small-holder rainfed farmers who constitute the majority of farmers in this region and hold low financial and technical capacity to adapt to climate variability and change. The agricultural productivity of the region is in decline\, and with fluctuation in crop production and a rise in market prices\, the ongoing agrarian crisis is predicted to increase food insecurity and poverty in South Asian countries.  \n\n\n\nSpeakers: \n\nVaibhav Chaturvedi is a fellow at The Council on Energy\, Environment and Water and an economist who leads The Council’s work on Low-Carbon Pathways. His research focuses on energy and climate change mitigation policy issues\, especially those impacting India\, within integrated assessment modeling framework of the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) \n\nN.H. Ravindranath is a professor at the Center for Sustainable Technologies at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore\, India. His research is focused on dimensions of Climate Change: Mitigation Assessment\, Carbon Sequestration Modeling\, Impact of Climate Change and Vulnerability Assessment in Forest and Agro-ecosystems. He has also worked on Bioenergy\, Biofuels and Biomass Production\, and Citizen Science.  \n\nModerator: Anatol Lieven\, Professor at Georgetown University in Qatar.
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/the-impact-of-climate-change-on-agriculture-in-south-asia/
CATEGORIES:Dialogue Series,Environmental Studies,Panels
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210407T200000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210407T213000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20210502T092723Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240314T072442Z
UID:10001444-1617825600-1617831000@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:Everyday Energy: Approaches to Lived Experience
DESCRIPTION:The Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University in Qatar  launched its newly-formed Energy Humanities research initiative with this webinar panel discussion titled “Everyday Energy: Approaches to Lived Experience.” The event featured three area experts in the field of Energy Humanities and was moderated by GU-Q faculty members\, Victoria Googasian\, Trish Kahle\, and Firat Oruc. The Energy Humanities initiative is a new project under the CIRS Environmental Studies thematic cluster and aims to provide new understandings of the influence and impacts of energy in everyday lives and stimulate new conversations in the scholarship.  \n\n\n\n\n\nSpeakers: \n\nDominic Boyer\, Founding Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences\, Rice University.  \n\nSara B. Pritchard\, Associate Professor in the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University.  \n\nJennifer Wenzel\, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and of Middle Eastern\, South Asian\, and African Studies at Columbia University. \n\nModerators: \n\nVictoria Googasian\, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University- Qatar. \n\nTrish Kahle\, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University- Qatar. \n\nFirat Oruc\, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University- Qatar. \n\n\nTranscript\n\n\n\n				\n				click here to read 			\n			\n								FIRAT ORCU [00:00:02]: Today’s webinar is part of the Energy Humanities Research Initiative\, which has been generously supported by Georgetown Qatar’s Center for International and Regional Studies. Our research initiative now in its second year focuses in particular on the importance of lived experiences to the to the study of Energy’s past\, present and future. We hope to facilitate the emergence of a new focus on energy as lived\, everyday lived experience in order to add complexity and texture to the narratives within the field that have primarily focused on questions of state building\, international relations\, economic development and technological systems. Last year\, we featured an inaugural webinar on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Everyday Energy with Dominic Boyer in Anthropology\, Sarah Pritchard in History\, and Jennifer Wenzel in Literature. In addition\, we had three podcast discussions that focused and drew attention to different material or experiential facets of energy culture\, with Elizabeth Barrios on Venezuelan oil literature\, Anto Mohsin on electricity and everyday life in Doha and Diana Montano on the electrification of Mexico City. Our focus last year led us to closer attention to recurring themes and questions in studying lived experiences of energy such as representation\, affect\, structures of feeling and phenomenology of energy forms. As we were trying to formalize these concepts\, we quickly realized that creative esthetic work with hydrocarbon in particular was a key venue to look at. To this end we produced a new podcast cluster themed as Energy Aesthetics: Representing Lived Experiences of Oil. We brought together creative artists to present their views on how their art deals with energetic life. We spoke with Venezuelan poet and scholar Santiago Acosta on abstract kinetic petro art and with Nigerian artist\, photographer\, and writer Victor Ehikhamenor about his installation\, The Wealth of Nations and hopefully pretty soon with Iranian graphic artist Amin Roshan on his silkscreen printing work with crude oil. You can find all our previous activities on our web page\, and we will share a link on the chat box. We conceived tonight’s webinar with the aim of bringing creative work and academic scholarship on energy together. We are really fortunate to have three distinguished panelists with recently published or forthcoming books to help us navigate new directions in studying the cultural and esthetic life of oil. I am honored to briefly introduce them being fully aware that these introductions are not really adequate to capture comprehensively the brilliant work they have produced. Our first speaker\, Cajetan Iheka\, is Associate Professor of English at Yale University. He’s the author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence Agency and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature 2018\, and a new one just came out from Duke University Press titled\, African Ecomedia: Network Forms Planetary Politics. Our second panelist\, Caren Irr\, is Professor of English at Brandeis University. In addition to being author or editor of five previous books\, she had recently edited a collection of critical essays titled Life in Plastic: Artistic Responses to Petromodernity\, published by University of Minnesota Press. And our third panelist\, Anne Pasek is the Canada Research Chair in media\, culture and the environment and an Assistant Professor cross-appointed between the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment at Trent University. Her forthcoming monograph entitled Fixing Carbon: Mediating Matter in a Warming World\, is a comparative study of how carbon became legible to different communities to different effects. The running order for tonight will be as follows. Each of our panelists will give their introductory remarks about the panel theme for about seven minutes. This will be followed by a moderated discussion session\, which will be facilitated by Vicky. During this discussion\, we will pose a question to a specific panelist and then offer time for other panelists to respond to that answer to build on a point they have raised and so on. And finally\, we will open the floor to audience discussion questions. Trish will moderate the audience Q&A session and wrap up the discussion. Two housekeeping items\, one at the bottom of the screen at the very right. You will find an icon for close captioning\, which will provide a live transcript and two\, our attendees can post questions at any time using the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen. We will make sure to address them during the Q&A session. Finally\, I would like to announce that we are in the process of drafting a call for papers and initial virtual working group on energy and affect theory with the goal of a special journal issue. Those who are interested in participating in or learning more about the project or have suggestions\, please kindly get in touch with us. Now I will go ahead and give it to Cajetan for his opening remarks. \nCAJETAN IHEKA [00:07:58]: Thank you so much for that amazing introduction\, and to you and Trish and Vicky for their excellent invitation. It’s a pleasant surprise when it came\, and it was exciting to see the work you’re doing. I wish this was in-person\, but we’ll make do with this and hopefully\, we’ll have opportunities to work in the future. So I’m just going to share screen\, because I just want to share a few images\, including Victoria Ehikhamenor’s work that was mentioned in the introduction. So basically\, I’ll just talk through them. So I just want to talk through the notion of “oil afterlives” in the Niger Delta and more broadly\, and one of the things that struck me as I worked on my new book\, which just came out\, “African Ecomedia\,” is really the way that oil is scholars have talked about the saturation of oil in our lives. I’m thinking of Bob Johnson’s recent work on mineral rites. The way that oil expenditure really saturates our life. But it seems to me too as I was researching this book\, that even as artists\, writers\, and scholars we’ve also been unable to escape oil. I realized that for a chapter where I was working on oil that was where I had the most material to work with and for other materials like\, say\, uranium\, where there were\, at least from the African context\, there were fewer artistic productions to work with\, or the same way that there’s a parallel between the saturation of oil in our lives and its saturation in cultural production. I thought that was something I wanted to start with. For us to think about oil’s materiality\, not only as an object of producing material\, but also the way that it has become the form and thematic content of too much cultural production\, especially from the global south. So that’s the one place that I want to start. So then oil in culture productions\, animating culture productions\, like this mural\, which is in Mayo County\, in Ireland\, we begin to see the way that it’s the oil movement. So we see in this particular image of a Niger Delta writer-activist\, an environmental matter if we think about the fact that this month marked 16 years that the Nigerian government killed Saro-Wiwa for his activism against oil exploration in the Niger Delta. But\, what then makes this community in Ireland to choose Ken Saro-Wiwa as the icon of this mural\, which they were developing as a protest against Shell’s plan to position an oil pipeline in their community? So we find a situation here where we find this crisscrossing that oil makes possible: the Nigerian community meeting an Irish community — a Nigerian community that’s been devastated by oil and one that is about to enter the oil business. So oil here becomes this animating principle that joins Nigeria to this European scene of oil production. So\, in a way then\, oil becomes this…it takes on this transnationality in this particular example that we’re seeing now. In the same way too\, in addition to bringing these communities together oil is taking on…it becomes the medium through which the human and non-human meet. Ken Saro-Wiwa protesting against the devastation of his indigenous community\, but is also interested in the way that oil is affecting the landscape. And we see the vegetation here struggling to breathe\, in this particular image\, struggling to make an appearance in this image\, we see that as a marking: that’s a boundary\, that’s a border\, the borderland\, the contact zone. So oil featuring and functioning as a contact zone\, not just where two communities meet\, but also where humans and non-humans meet for interaction. Then of course\, there’s also the question of oil infrastructure itself\, the way that media has come to deal with oil infrastructure itself. And as we look at the future of oil\, one of the things that have been interesting to me at the moment is what happens in places like Niger Delta\, what happens to this oil infrastructure as we move to renewables\, as we move to non-fossil fuel. The insightful work that has been done in environmental humanities from Rob Nixon and others\, have shown us more clearly the durability of oil. I’m thinking of Caren’s new work on plastic\, for example\, the way that they outlive…the long-lasting durée of this material. So what then? What do we do with this archival infrastructure that remains potent\, that remains toxic\, that remains active\, even post-renewable? As the world moves on from oil\, will these communities in the Niger Delta and other parts of the fringes\, if we can call them that…the margin…what happens to these communities as oil moves on…as we move on from oil. That’s something I’ve been thinking about. And what role will cultural production play in this afterlife of oil? But again\, there’s a sense in which one of the things that we think about\, ultimately\, then is to hold on to this notion of afterlife and interrogate it when it comes to oil\, when it comes to plastic. To what extent\, what is this “after”? That’s one something I’ve been I’ve started thinking about: what does “after” mean? What does “after” mean within the context of the continuous radiation of oil\, even when we’ve moved on from it? Even when we moved on from these communities. I’m thinking of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s community Ogoniland where\, after his execution\, Shell left the area\, and it was said that oil production has stopped. But did production really stop after Shell left? With the continuous spill from the pipelines\, the corrosion of the pipelines\, and what that means for contaminating the earth\, contaminating the water in this environment. So the notion of “after” is something that I’ve been thinking about\, more recently. I was contacted by an artist working in Nigeria in the Niger Delta\, who is using pipelines\, the discarded pipelines in the Niger Delta\, to produce art. So he reached out I would send my work to talk about the process of producing the work with me. And it struck me that this is the moment where he is working a stream in pictures of working with this material\, which is black\, blackened from oil\, from those and I’m thinking about the kind of entanglements\, that kind of transcorporeality that is happening in that moment of artistic production\, where he is immersed in oil\, so to speak\, and what does that mean for him? But also for the communities that have been immersed in oil over time before these pipelines were discarded and he is using them for his artistic production. Then the other thing to think about\, for me\, beyond thinking of oil as this contact zone beyond thinking of its afterlives\, when we have moved on. Is to think of the way that its the kind of binary structure\, if you can call it that\, that oil produces. And this is Victor Ehikhamenor’s work “The Wealth of Nations\,” which he first exhibited in 2015 in Indonesia at this biennale. And it’s interesting to me that the way that this resonates…the way that the situation in Niger Delta\, which is the context of Victor’s work\, the way it resonated with this history of violence — energy violence — in that community as well\, in the same way that the Nigerian context works with the Irish example that I started with at the beginning. But the other thing that is interesting here is the way that pleasure\, the way that spectacle\, the way that pleasure becomes kind of an animated impulse here and that it’s easy to lose sight of the violence of oil. As we take in this particular exhibit. So unless you know the history of oil violence in Nigeria… that these drums also serve as…they’ve also been used by the Nigerian state in the 1990s…they were used for the extrajudicial executions that were happening in the country\, when many people were lined up\, when people put protesters\, so-called protesters were lined up\, tied to drums like this\, and executed for their protest against the Nigerian state. But again\, think about it\, what is the thing that the Nigerian state is most concerned about\, which is the preservation of oil wealth. It is to make sure that oil wealth continues to flow uninterrupted\, not because it would be used as a common wealth\, but because it is such\, that it will fuel the pockets of Nigerian leaders. So here we begin to see the way that oil projects are becoming complete. Oil aesthetics is an incomplete aesthetics. Inasmuch as it shows…it links spaces…Inasmuch as it brings into view areas of the world that wouldn’t normally come into existence. We also begin to see them as incomplete projects. They need a filling out. They need contextualization. They need aestheticization. So the cultural life of oil itself is incomplete I think. When we speak about representation so that what we’ll find here are ways that images\, text\, and other kinds of cultural production the way that with oil\, there is always something that exceeds the grasp of the representation before us. So that’s oil always needs a supplement inasmuch as it is a fundamental aspect of our lives. So\, yeah\, that’s where I would stop. I’m hoping I would be able to flesh out things when we would get to the conversation proper. \nORUC [00:21:12]: Thank you. Thanks so much for those remarks\, Cajetan. Caren\, please take it away. \nCAREN IRR [00:21:22]: I was going to start sharing. Yes\, because I want to share something. So\, OK. All right. Thank you. I’m going to share the slides that I’ve prepared too. And these are basically slides just to give you a little bit more concrete sense of some of the contributions to this collection that Firat mentioned that just came out Like in Plastic. And this is a collection that I started working on kind of like 2017\, when the\, in the U.S.\, at least we were having lots and lots of public discussion about banning plastic bags and straws. And though these very small items that you see around you as as waste\, as things\, you know\, bags cut in trees and so on and became a kind of target of attention. I actually would be really interested to know why at that moment\, these long standing issues with those two particular items have really kicked in. But whatever the reason\, there was a dramatic rise in interest in the questions relating to waste\, plastic waste and consumption or overconsumption. And I really wanted to see if there were ways to anchor those concerns with consumption in a broader economy of extraction and production of these of these synthetic polymers. So in other words\, could we could we attach\, the visible parts of everyday life that take the form of\, you know\, single use\, cheap\, often kind of colorful and supposedly super hygienic plastics to the dirty economy\, much more widespread\, underground and at a distance from the everyday lives of most American consumers. So that was the kind of question that I started with. And then I I did\, of course\, a group of the smartest people that I could think of. I am on this on this topic and got great\, great and interesting essays that had to do with the ways that plastic is reckoned with in contemporary sculpture\, in comics\, in eco poetry\, in the realist novel\, in science fiction in a little bit. I have a piece on film and a chapter on on vinyl and the LP and how music culture kind of is dependent on a plastic substructure. And one of the things that emerged from this group of essays that kind of surprised me. I guess I should show you the cover of the Table of Contents for my book. Here I am. One of the things that really surprised me was how many of the essays that people were writing really hinged on the question of the human body\, from the organs of perception\, to the interior\, to the life cycle\, from birth to death and and a kind of unearthly afterlives\, to use Cajetan’s word. And so many\, so many of these things that people were writing about kind of touched on this question of whether we have the same human body in an environment that’s saturated by plastics. Definitely the people attending to these questions that I thought would be everybody’s question\, which is\, how is plastic the face of the petro economy? But I was really interested in this other in this other theme in the sensorium and the massive anxieties about the transformations to the human body that occur when the petro economy kind of takes this form in our everyday lives. And I guess just as a parenthesis\, I want to say that I’m well aware that only about nine percent of the oil and natural gas\, extractions produce plastics are used to produce plastics. But there’s a lot of interest. There’s been a lot of interest in forecasting whether those numbers will change. In the US mots of our plastic comes from natural gas. But I think that varies in different parts of the world. But everywhere around the world\, the predictions are that there’s going to be a massive in continuing escalation of the amount of plastic produced to the end. If projections about shifting towards renewable energy sources for things like heating and transportation continue\, that means that the portion of fossil fuels that are used to produce plastics is is highly likely to expand some. I read an article earlier that was in Forbes magazine predicting that as much as 45 percent of fossil fuel production will be used to produce plastics by 2040. So these projections you never really know\, but I think the general trend of an increasing portion of the petro economy on taking the shape of plastics is is a good take away there. So let me just give you a little flavor of what the what the contributors did for this\, for this collection. And I’ve chosen one from each from each piece. So Jane Kuenz from University of Southern Maine wrote a terrific piece about the Body Worlds exhibit. You know\, more than 50 million people have seen this exhibit. It’s traveled around the world\, and it’s comprised of these actual human bodies that were. They’re donated or scavenged for these exhibits and then preserved using this special process that the kind of main force between the exhibit Gunther von Hagens refers to as plastination\, essentially injecting existing organs and musculature and so on with polymers that fix the body in these in these various poses. You know\, in principle\, according to the organizers of these exhibits\, they’re supposed to be educational and kind of teach you about the glory and the beauty of the interior of the human body and promote healthy practices. Because\, like they’ll show you lungs darkened by smoke and compare those to\, the healthy lungs. So but\, you’re not looking at a healthy human body\, you’re looking at a plastic version of a human body. And there is something very unearthly about this way of preserving and ripping off the skin to create the spectacle of a body that is has outlasted\, its subject in various ways. And Jane’s essay beautifully unpacks the centrality of plastic to this to this medicalized understanding of bodies\, as well as a culture of spectacle on which in which it relies. And it’s\, I think\, just fascinating. I’m in the second section that’s more to do with with petro capitalisms. Chris Breu has a really interesting essay about Richard Powers’s novel Gain and the relationship between cancer clusters and illness\, and that kind of corporate production of oil derived pesticides and cleaning products and so on. And he develops\, Breu develops this interesting concept of the petrochemical unconscious. Kind of riffing off of other versions of the unconscious\, especially Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious. And what he’s interested in is\, again\, that that relationship between what we can see and immediately experience in this case\, the experience of illness and the underlying economy and organization of our material life that’s allows that experience to emerge. So petro petrochemicals and their corporate use and circulation and sort of seepage into our everyday environments is the dynamic that brew and articulates. And he has an interesting way of of\, if I may say\, refining the concept of. Refining the concept of the unconscious to to suggest that it’s a version of like the non-conscious. It’s not that we can’t be aware of these elements of our life\, it’s that we actively repress them in order to sustain something like unendurable private life. And I think that’s a really interesting dynamic I’d love to talk more about. And so from after death to illness\, we move in in Margaret Ronda’s interesting essay on Eco-poetics into Birth. She has a beautiful reading of Craig Santos Peres’s The Age of Plastic\, a poem in which the poet is meditating on his daughter’s birth and the presence of\, plastic medical care equipment right there. From the very first seconds of her life\, she’s wrapped in plastic and touched in someone. These are her first sensory experiences\, outside of the womb. And I think that’s a that’s a really chilling kind of idea. And he’s both excited by and disturbed by the role of plastics in the birth in the birth process and kind of confronts the the the tenderness of the newborn’s skin with this kind of solidity and artificiality of the medical equipment. And then Adam Dickinson’s\, Anatomic which she also writes about is involved involves a kind of poetic reflection on these endocrinological experiments or reckonings that records that that the poet does where he’s looking and basically at the and recording the traces of different kinds of plastic byproducts in his own\, in his own body\, bodily fluids. You know\, the whole range of them. So there’s a kind of gothic element that has to do with this interior circulation of these plastic plastic elements. So here we really see that deep anxiety about the petrochemical presence. In human life\, from its earliest moments in through adulthood and finally\, the the last section of the of the book is about\, is there such thing as a post plastic future? You know\, if let’s say that every single ban on plastic was 100 percent effective and people complied with it entirely\, we stopped producing plastics. We’re still living with\, all of the tons and tons of plastic that’s already been produced and that’s clogs up the oceans and\, circulates in our in our water\, in our skin and our food systems and so on. You know what\, what are these futures look like where you have these remainders? And Lisa Swanstrom has a lovely essay where she’s interested in thinking about the role that plastic has played just in shaping visions of the future at all\, and then kind of turns that into questions about these\, these newer or more recent petrochemical anxieties. So she starts with what she calls proto plastic imaginaries in H.G. Wells and a bunch of other writers who envision the their own kind of mock plastics. You know that and reckon with the strange capacities that this malleable\, colorful\, light\, eerily lightweight and so on product has. And then I think through different kinds of worlds where that these essentially alchemical and magical substances can be produced through a number of different energy systems. So they’re kind of excited by in this early 20th century kind of utopian sensibility the the thrills of the benefits of plastic as the base of the petro-economy. And then she shifts to some contemporary stories where the and the blobby\, amorphous shapes and malleable structures of of plastics take on a much more menacing turn. And she’s especially interested in faces in the way that there’s kind of masking of the human face that that emerges as an interesting theme. There are so the post plastic future is still one that we’re looking through. And in her essay\, and some of the others as well that deal with the future kind of ask us to think about whether it’s even feasible to imagine a post plastic future because of the enormous number of years\, centuries\, millennia that it takes time to degrade the plastic that’s already been created. There may in fact\, only be a continuity\, of of plastics. Again\, even if we banned them immediately switched 100 percent to other kinds of energy systems or completely shifted over to bioplastics made from corn or whatever else. So I guess the big takeaway from the collection as a whole\, which moves and all kinds of other directions in addition to those that I’ve outlined\, is that I think it might be a good idea for environmental humanities to maybe let go of a figure that certainly has been really important in American literary history\, which is that figure of Leo Marx’s\, Machine in the Garden\, where it’s the disruption of the the train into the forest. That is that is the kind of signal for the for the problem\, that we’re facing. You know\, the train\, of course\, is coal in its big iron and it’s industrialism. And all those are\, of course\, ongoing crucial issues\, as is the forest and deforestation. But so many of the problems that we are facing\, but not yet fully able to picture to ourselves\, I think relates to this plastic wrapped body\, which I guess I would suggest is as good as a figure\, as useful a figure\, as compelling a figure as the machine in the garden and maybe even more specifically like plastic wrapped meat. You know that earthly experience of peeling back the plastic so that you can extract your food from it and do whatever it is\, you’re going to do\, chop it and cook it and put it inside your own body. That\, I think is a kind of nutshell figure for the face of environmental problems that we’re facing that we experience today. It’s it’s eerie\, it’s common. It’s anxiety producing. It shifts us away from something like the sublimity of the machine in the garden towards what Sianne Ngai calls\, the stuplimity and the esthetic of repetition\, almost tedium and eerie avant-gardeness\, at the same time. And I think so. I guess that’s the takeaway that I have is that the plastic wrapped meat as a figure for our environmental condition can anchor us in the petro-economy and release a bunch of new esthetic projects that allow us to mediate on our environment. You know\, in a way that wakes up our senses and wakes up our our ethical and political imaginaries. Thanks \nORUC [00:38:35]: Thank you\, Caren. This is really fascinating\, and I think what I hear in the first two present\, the opening remarks it is a common term is corporeal entanglements\, but will have further discussions about that. Now finally\, Anne who will close out the first round of the panel\, please. \nANNE PASEK [00:39:00]: Right. Hi\, everyone. I’m going to try and be quick\, so we have lots of time for your discussion. Yeah\, I will get my slides in order. Yeah. So I\,  come to this question through a slightly different trajectory and that I am a cultural studies\, media studies kind of scholar who’s really interested in climate politics. So before I came to care about oil\, my my like commitment was always to like it was per million CO2. And my book project is all about the tricky problems of making carbon legible and like culturally meaningful to different audiences. When\, like the materiality of carbon is a\, is a fraught endeavor because it’s constantly moving through different forms of material\, one of which is petrol carbons. Other forms include like CO2. Our bodies themselves\, rocks\, right? And so it’s it’s a sort of tricky thing to to track and act on politically and therefore a really intriguing problem to me. And so I found myself in Edmonton\, Alberta\, which was also my hometown doing a postdoc with the Petro Cultures Group\, and I was sort of shocked to see this dissonance between my scholarly work\, which was just very much all about\, the media of accounting or of climate denialism and the everyday experiences of being around in the city\, which which had absolutely nothing to say about carbon and where I had tons and tons of say about oil. So I found myself\, coming back to this\, the substance and the world that it makes. But but with less of an aim to write a book about it or an academic article\, and more so to just sort of find a way to express and share some feelings\, right. More more so then some thoughts. So for those who don’t know\, Edmonton\, Alberta is sort of the administrative capital of the province of Alberta\, but also the large oil or tar sands development that happens in the north of the province. And the sort of state revenues from oil dictate the state revenues of the province. And I have a very\, very pronounced thumbprint on the politics therein. But I also thought that it was just really pronounced presence in the city that I was being reintroduced to and wanted to reflect on. Right. So that I think just to give a shout out to the podcast. Santiago Acosta makes this point that oil has multiple ontologies\, right. That it’s both a substance and a abstract financial substance\, right. A commodity that gets traded\, and that this sort of fraught dual nature of it can surface in different art forms can surface in different state practices. And I guess my observation was like\, it’s very much true of affected infrastructure. So my my aims are modest. I wanted to produce something that would be a reflection about Edmonton’s petro-cultures that would circulate in Edmonton and that people who had the same experiences that I was having would know that we shared this condition that we could sort of go deep into everyday life and sort of connect over the weirdness of certain parts of the town\, parts that I think are true of many\, many cities in the global north. Maybe the global south to a degree\, but but which just popped out in this very oily city. So I\, during the pandemic started making some drawings\, writing some text. Compiled it altogether into magazine called everyday oil. And a part of the reason why I was drawing was just to sort of linger really long in place. Think about what it means that like the the heart of the downtown\, the Lake Club District has like a five to six lane highway down the middle of it\, and that people are unfazed by by this huge sort of sensory disruption in the middle of urban life that there are strange\, mysterious pipelines crossing through ravines that we don’t totally know what the substance are. But but were really captivating to me as a child\, right. There’s a really lively culture of resistance and an occupation in relation to ongoing forms of violence\, extraction and statecraft that are trying to build pipelines out of Edmonton into the states where that oil can be brought to market. And so I would find myself with my climate activist friends occupying malls and banks and and just sort of. In the strange experience of making everyday office workers uncomfortable\, but not like unmanageable also and just sort of the overlapping worldviews and affects and emotional management strategies in that moment were were I think an intriguing one to capture. It’s also the case that most of the city’s parks are buried on top of gas pipelines just because this is sort of uninsurable land that can be sort of given over to public benefit as a kind of no cost afterthought. And so being environmental also means living on top of oil infrastructure. Many many people who’ve made out extremely well in the oil industry and who have rather expensive and oil themed country clubs in which a teenager can linger. And\, the attempts to sort of find exit trajectories from oil finance to divest my own like very\, very modest postdoctoral savings in my credit union\, were were not only frustrated but but happens like a block away from the Legislature. And so the overall experience was just of everyday life and infrastructure being as was mentioned earlier\, kind of interestingly\, durable obstacle to imagining other worlds. And I wanted to just capture that and share that. And because I’m a cultural city scholar\, I’m really interested in questions of circulation. So I I kind of have like a suspicion of formal art world institutions. I think\, as Victor Ehikhamenor mentioned in the podcast\, right\, like he can show his art abroad\, but to show it in Nigeria would be to not come too much because there is a kind of way in which folks are closed off to an arts based critique. I think that’s true to a large degree in Edmonton as well. So my my aim here esthetically was to use images to come up with a sort of affective experience\, but also use that aesthetics as a lure. So I produced like hundreds of copies of this scene and dropped it off in like free libraries all around town\, where people will read books or read pieces of art for folks to come and find. And then I also did what I’ve been calling a reverse snowball sample. So I have a little brother who works in the gas industry\, and I gave him a bunch of copies to divide to his friends and then told them to give out further copies that way. So I’m interested in trying to think about modes of thinking and sharing and circulating ideas. These reflections\, right\, to sort of build up a common recognition that we all have these weird moments of encounter with oil infrastructures\, but that\, academic texts and art institutions may not always be the best way to do it. So it’s been an experiment and an interesting one at that. It’s been published in the journal Heliotrope\, so it has the sort of afterlife circulating as an academic research creation product. But the the more immediate goal was just to get this out into the world and see what happens. And then I’ll just quickly add that this is a shifting energy gears\, right. But the sort of spirit of practice space inquiry has lived on in my participation in a project called Solar Protocol. So with a couple of collaborators joined a network of of a very\, very micro solar internet servers\, which are sort of networked across the world and that we’ve published is in on what it might mean make solar-powered media\, why you might want to do so. And what could come of it? And it is involved\, building some technical skills\, but also having a practice where every day I check to make sure my battery is appropriately charged and that I have a kind of interesting\, effective attachment to my little solar system. Based on this practice of care\, which folks on the critical make community have talked a lot about. And I’m sort of interested in also thinking about this sort of making practice sharing that rather than just just the esthetics\, could be an interesting pathway forward. So there is much to say about lower powered internet stuff and the esthetics that obtains to like low power intermittent energy systems as as an interesting way of thinking forward to a future that might look a little more retro than chrome. And also this larger aspirations in the project to build up a global network of solar powered servers because there’s always sun somewhere. So if we can build our technology\, based around those logics of intermittency\, but also constancy\, we might end up somewhere really interesting. But I will I will not dig too deep into that and I will instead. Excited to hear your questions and thoughts. \nORUC [00:48:55]: Thank you so much to all of our speakers for those really stimulating opening remarks. Now we are going to move into the moderated discussion and I am handing over things to my colleague Vicky. \nVICTORIA GOOGASIAN [00:49:11]: Yeah\, thanks Firat\, and thanks to all of you for the comments so far. As Firat mentioned way back at the beginning\, I’m going to direct the questions to each of you in turn to sort of take a first stab at. But I’m hoping that you’ll take the opportunity to respond to each other as well\, because as has already become clear\, these are themes that that really unite all of your work. So I’ll go ahead and start with with Cajetan\, because your work as the title of your recent book suggests gives us this really useful theorization of eco-media. And you say or you argue that that eco-media forms approach the lived experience of energy by\, “encouraging the cultivation of an ecological ethics that entails alertness to others into the world.” And the various instances of eco media that you discuss in your work\, some of which you also sort of highlighted for us already this evening. These are these are instances that illustrate the representational capacity of the visual and media forms for laying bare the commodifying logic of oil extraction and its perversities\, specifically in the Niger Delta. But we wanted to ask you if you can speak a little bit about the limits of that representational capacity. Are there moments where representation fails? And this\, I mean\, this is also\, I think\, following up a little bit on that on the tail end of Anne’s comments as well about the obstacles that this durable infrastructure of oil presents\, even for cultural forms as well. \nIHEKA [00:50:50]: Right. Yeah. Thank you so much for that\, Vicky. As Anne was concluding\, she talked about distributing this in a beautiful zine to broader colleagues\, I was just thinking why it’s so interesting to go back and bring these guys together and have a conversation about what they’re saying\, and what they’re thinking see how that’s…to what extend that interacts with Anne’s intention. But that’s by the way. One of the things that I think about in terms of representational limits\, last night as I was listening to the podcast with Victor\, he was talking about the image with Oloibiri: the tub with the water in his installation. He was talking beautifully about the way that there’s Oloibiri in water and then the oil\, the oil spilling into that. And how it took 48 hours for oil to obliterate the water\, but also the image — the cancelation –if you want to use that…the disappearance of Oloibiri\, which is this community in Nigeria\, where oil was first discovered in 1950s. So that for me\, I think it becomes a paradigmatic case of the limits of representation\, because what do we see when we find\, when we encounter the image of when oil has saturated the water and obliterated Oloibiri? Do we have a complete image if we see it earlier on\, when Oloibiri and oil is still intact in that water? So for me\, representation\, it’s really in this moment when the temporality of artistic production becomes unable to hold at once the multiple significations that is made possible with the oil…sorry\, the water and Oloibiri intact. And then what happens 48 hours later when oil has overtaken everything. Especially now when this image circulates on the internet. When I see the image with Oloibiri intact\, I don’t know what else has happened. I don’t know the kind of obliteration that has happened that would happen if I let oil drip into that water gradually. So I think we find that there’s a problem of temporality there that is compounded by circulation; the fact that we’re not all live witnesses in Indonesia when this was happening\, or in Poland\, where the work was recreated. So the problem of circulation that is banned with temporality\, I think\, is one of the problems of oil. The other thing about representation\,…the other thing about representational image\, and I talk a little bit about this in my new book\, is the way in which sometimes the problem of…part of the problem of oil is the way that the kind of images it invites the image of spectacle that it invites I think oftentimes reduces or undermines the problems that we want to highlight in the first place. There’s a sense some of the images I work with\, they’re images that have been aestheticized. They have become aestheticized in interesting\, fascinating ways. And they run the risk of losing a critical edge\, the critical edge that you hope that viewers will bring to such a work. So the problem of aestheticization\, the problem of temporality\, but also the ways that the problem of contextualization\, I thought\, the ways that these works themselves\, they’re not in themselves self-sufficient. If we think of them as artistic projects fine\, we can all bring our interpretations to them\, and that’s fine. But when we think of them within the science of the kind of activist-political work we’ve been talking about this morning\, the kind of meaning it creates becomes very important. There are moments when those meanings are not reached in some fashion\, especially when we’re dealing with works from different parts of the world. There’s the risk of us absorbing those works also\, instead of dealing with their singularity\, embracing them within our culture. There is a sense in which they become diluted\, they become immersed\, just as oil itself and lose that texture. So\, yeah\, I will stop there. I’m curious to hear what Caren and Anne have to add to that. Yeah\, I think I’ll give you both the opportunity to respond to any of those those I think you’ve given us now three limits of representation that ego media faces temporality\, aestheticization\, and contextualization. \nIRR [00:56:50]: I think that’s such an important question\, and certainly there’s an already existing discussion about the limits of of “mimesis.” You know\, in environmental writing generally\, like does reading a description of a beautiful landscape make you appreciate that landscape in some kind of a deep way that would supplement or even replace kind of immersion in that in that landscape. So that kind of problem about mimesis is replicated in these issues about oil economies and sort of toxic environments kind of more generally does a description\, of a situation of toxicity or of horrific mining practice or fracking or something like that. You know\, function on its own to interpret itself as Cajetan was just saying\, like\, is it self-evident. Etc. So I had to work with that. And then we have these kind of familiar problems about protest literature generally and what happens to that with the kind of ideological redundancies that are built in\, to certain kinds of protest literature where it’s feels too closed not just to function as art\, but to function in a very politically enlivening and energizing way that’s presumably central to the project in the first place. So I think those are crucial questions raised with particular urgency on this topic\, and I guess I’ve been interested in so many other people have in these different kinds of ironic\, skeptical\, horror driven\, kind of cheeseball humor\, dark humor\, kind of driven projects to see if they could produce some\, some detours or some ways\, some unpredictable and oblique points of entry into this whole situation. And I think in the plastics stuff that I’ve been looking at\, they’re interested in\, horror a lot. And I think as an alternative to elegy\, as the as the kind of presumably politically charged esthetic. The difficulty\, though\, is I think more generally and there’s interesting things can happen there. But I think the general difficulty for for petro-esthetics is that we can picture if you\, the infrastructure\, the refinery\, the pipeline\, the gas station or whatever. But the substance itself is difficult\, to envision\, you know\, maybe sometimes you have like the sheen on a on a black surface\, doesn’t that cover image for Richard Powers gains that I showed you a few minutes ago. But like capital\, oil is difficult to see. You see its effects and you see the commodities produced from it\, the kind of intentionally produced commercialized versions. You see the mediations\, but not the substance in circulation itself. And the flip side\, so that’s for the text. The problem with representing toxicities relating to\, petro-economies has that kind of familiar problem of kind of critiques of capitalism\, literature\, critics of capitalism or art\, some critique of capitalism\, but also on the utopian end. If the utopia for. But many people working on on energy issues is keep it in the ground\, right. Then you’re your most utopian image is either the sun which is burned your eyeballs on or\, like the undisturbed ground. Right. So again\, you’re not seeing it\, by definition\, it reminds me and then I’ll stop\, at that. You know\, the effect that Antonioni gives in and Blow Up right. Where at the end of the film\, there’s this famous scene where he’s like showing it’s an imaginary tennis match and the camera’s just kind of moving back and forth. But there’s no ball. You’re actually just looking at the court. But the preceding narrative has trained you to be interested in the drama of just looking at that empty court. Right. I think we need a similarly inventive kind of esthetics that will allow us to see an undisturbed landscape as one where there is a drama\, and an interest. a projects underway and the project is keep it in the ground. And I don’t know what you call that kind of esthetic and a lot of people don’t like blow up. So it wouldn’t be exactly that. But or\, it’s that’s a moment of the kind of post-modernist movement. But I think that’s that’s sort of a a bookmark for esthetic challenges that that we face for envisioning the utopian alternatives to a kind of horrific toxicity which were maybe more at ease with and partly. Yeah. \nPASEK [01:02:32]: I won’t add too much on this because I think so much wonderful things have been said and I don’t want to prevent further questions from being asked. I guess I’ll just sort of pose an open question\, which is that in the environmental humanities\, right\, we often look to artists to to do this esthetic work for us. I’m not sure that is a convincing historical argument\, right. It seems like the way these questions get determined is what social movements make of esthetics and the sort of political energy they invest in them and the way that they make them circulate. And I think that we we can sort of see\, in my backyard if that were right\, like questions over the oil sands versus the tar sand and the sort of fraught questions of like the esthetic spectacle versus the slow violence that have come in that context\, it doesn’t seem like there really is a esthetic that can do it all. And so it does seem like it’s a kind of war of position question where you’re trying to find contextually responsive\, collectively inspiring answers to partial questions that help you move forward one step of the way. \nGOOGASIAN [01:03:47]: I think maybe I’ll I’ll seize that opportunity that you’ve given me to actually direct a question that you\, Anne\, about your your recent work on the effective dimensions of energy and in particular\, how these dimensions are being activated and how these contested narratives of of carbon. And and also maybe to kind of bring us back to this word\, this key word that Firat already highlighted for us\, which is transcorporeality is I think you argue that we have to attend to the transcorporeality of carbon in order to just sort of build these new structures of feeling toward the carbon cycle. And in your recent essay in Environmental Humanities\, which I think Trish already linked in the chat. If anyone’s interested\, you argue\, I think pretty convincingly that climate denialists have already recognized and made use of this embodied transcorporealogic albeit in this kind of dishearteningly familiar appeal to racial and gendered stories about whose bodily experience gets to count. So we might\, I think your comments are already pointing us in this direction. We might want to kind of view the realities of climate changes as a kind of settled fact and turned to artists and artists and cultural practitioners to sort of convey that fact to people. But you’re pointing out to us that the carbon cycle is already at the center of these multiple contested narratives. So I’m just wondering if you want to say anything more about this\, about contesting the story of carbon. What are the…what new openings do we see when we combine effective and narrative work with our structural critique? \nPASEK [01:05:34]: Yeah\, yeah. So to sort of give a little more context about that article. So the article\, which is also going to be a book chapter\, is about how this one particular strain of climate denialism\, I call them “carbon-vitalists\,” argue that because we exhale CO2 out of our bodies and our bodies are in part made of carbon\, as are the bodies of plants and animals and the whole ecosystem. And plants like carbondioxide. Carbondioxide is good and that we should therefore burn as much oil as possible to enrich the atmosphere with carbondioxide to serve the cause of life in cosmic terms\, right. And it’s an argument that borrows from a lot of like ecosystem connection interdependence of esthetics\, as well as really embodied ways of knowing the world. In this case\, knowing it quite incorrectly right. And the bodies that are sort of centered in these arguments are all almost exclusively white men and their families. And the argument brought to bear is that\, you know\, if you call industrial pollution\, pollution carbondioxide\, then you’re sort of saying that our bodies are polluting and that really violates some deeply held racial scripts\, and we will therefore reject your proposition. And I think it’s worthwhile to go to these uncomfortable case studies\, where we see a lot of the tools of feminist anti-racist\, science studies\, or epistemologies or esthetics more broadly being picked up and used by our enemies because it reminds us that our tools aren’t like a priori a political good right. There are ways of appealing to embodied knowledge that are quite harmful and racist and have succeeded in delaying climate action in really substantive federal scales. But so that’s that’s the bad news. The good news to me\, though\, is that you can kind of look at how these esthetics are being mobilized and like\, cry theft\, right. And that there’s something encouraging about the fact that these extremely politically reactionary white guys do want to have a caring relationship for ecosystem\, right. And they do want to to recognize that bodies can produce knowledge and that we should\, you know\, legitimate that. And so the sort of opening that to me suggests is that the goal is to kind of look through the stream of climate denialism\, give a hard no to all of the racist\, sexist stuff at its core. but just sort of see lingering in the chaff there are parts that could be mobilized to some other political project\, right. Like\, I think the way forward here is to to sort of demobilize these movements and redirect those energies towards other projects that fulfill similar affective needs. So I’m interested in thinking about what a future of carbon removal might look like. If we are offering scripts and like actual jobs\, like forms of action\, political and economic that people can take that do position them in that caring role\, whether that is\, getting oil workers to work on carbon removal pipelines or getting rural folks to do soil sequestration for for carbondioxide\, right. It seems like they’re they’re in in like the darkest of of grim political toxins. We can see these sort of ways through and they’re not guaranteed\, right. I think that how one picks up that potential is going to look very different in many different contexts and probably won’t succeed in every case. But it may be useful to to include that in the portfolio of climate politics because we don’t want a world where we are just sort of deepening our commitment and engagement with our in groups. Well\, allowing those who have been politically polarized to continue to be more intensely against us. So I think that’s kind of a one one possible outcome of combining esthetic\, affective and structural analytics and that you can sort of see these new tactical directions for climate strategy. \nGOOGASIAN [01:10:10]: Yeah\, that’s it’s really fascinating\, I was sort of blown away by the idea that the logic of transcorporeality and embodied aspect is something that sort of unites voices from across the political spectrum in this context. I guess I’ll give the opportunity to our other two panelists or respond before I redirect us again here. \nIRR [01:10:40]: I don’t know if people in this conversation have been reading Michael Marder’s work on plants\, plant being. But if I could see it being super useful in that kind of conversation\, he has some lovely concepts about the deep generosity of plants being\, I mean\, sometimes he uses the phrase vegetal-communism to think about this. You know where he’s…these are my leaves\, you know\, here. You know\, if you think about plant being as you know it\, sure\, it absorbs carbon\, but it’s also\, you know\, releasing endlessly releasing exactly what we need to do to breathe. And there’s…he’s got a way of thinking about plants\, not just as passive receptacles or\, you know\, things that are being starved or whatever\, which seems to be the vision of kind of the climate denialists that are the carbon-vitalists is in some sense. But you know\, you’d only have to take introductory biology to understand\, the cycle of that’s involved there. And then to think deeply with plant being as an act of release is I think\, would be an interesting way to build knowledge rather than just shut down\, which is surely if we’re not skilled sketch artists or\, you know\, aren’t engaged directly in art practice\, then certainly producing knowledge and producing pedagogy and is a skill set that the.. we cultivate in academia\, among ourselves and with our students and just being able to kind of seize seize the pedagogy\, the pedagogical prospect\, of a conversation like that\, whether it be at a holiday or\, you know\, at a town meeting or whatever\, it’s important. \nIHEKA [01:12:44]: Yeah. Very quickly. I just…I’m really fascinated by this\, by the idea of really contesting\, the logic of carbon and producing knowledge around it. What I wanted to have to do that…to the amazing comments that have already been made is to think about\, when we think about transcorporeality what kind of bodies are we involving in this connection? I think this becomes especially important in know when we think about\, the global climate movement and the kind of voices and bodies that get emphasized\, I think that’s crucial. I’m thinking about\, I think in the pandemic when\, you know\, when there was…I think it was at Davos\, when the youth…there were just youth climate activists\, you know\, there was a photo of them. And then this Ugandan young activist Vanessa Nakate was cropped out of the photo that The Associated Press had eventually published. You know\, that’s you know\, that’s I think\, you know\, we’re finding in that particular moment\, this example\, you know\, there’s you know\, the connection being made is these young people at that moment. The kind of knowledge mixing that would produce in a new epistemology is being undercut\, undermined\, when certain voices or certain images are removed from the conversation. So I think this has to be part of this knowledge building. Making sure that the future\, the future of global climate activism movements to make sure that voices… It’s not just African voices\, that is indigenous voices\, but those other voices have a place and not just us talking about their worldview\, their ways of seeing the world. That can be part of this new narratives\, of new stories\, new politics\, new knowledge of carbon that is being produced just wanted to add that real quick. \nGOOGASIAN [01:14:51]: Yeah\, thank you all for those comments. I think I’ll just go ahead and ask one more moderated question because I know we want to save some time for the questions we’ve got in the chat as well. But I thought maybe I could direct a final question to Caren to help us think about furturity a little bit. Since this term afterlives has has also been sort of circulating through your comments\, and it was definitely something that I noticed that connected a number of the essays and life in plastic\, which is plasticity\, is almost kind of paradoxical construction of futurity. Plasticity is this kind of toxic form\, on the one hand\, that’s threatening the future of life on the planet. And on the other hand\, it’s a metaphor for survival. The thing that allows your body to survive after death and these amazing and terrifying exhibits in the Body Worlds exhibition. And this is a theme that also emerges particularly strongly in Margaret Ronda’s work on an eco-products as well. And in the introduction\, you write about the plastic utopianism of the 20th century thinkers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Roland Barthe. And then you point out that this is a feeling that that has kind of faded in the ecological crises of of our own century. So I thought I would just ask if you could speak about how plastic or petrochemicals more generally shape our ability to imagine future worlds? \nIRR [01:16:31]: Sure\, and well definitely waste is always a question about the future\, whether it be a spill\, an oil spill or\, you know\, the Great Pacific garbage patch and all that stuff because it’s about what’s persisting\, you know\, what’s ineradicable or what’s going to\, force us to envision a really long term timescale of biodegradableness or non-biodegradableness. So there are futures of that sort that are extrapolations or continuations or durations in some sense. But there’s but that that utopian futurity that you mentioned it a minute ago is\, I think\, well\, it’s not central to the way that we necessarily think about plastic right now. It’s still present. And I think the key to that utopian aspect of of plastics and the many other forms of kind of commodity production in particular that are associated with\, the 20th century boom in the economy. I’m trying to think of\, trying to remember Ernest Mendel’s phrase. But anyway\, like the economy is released by the combustion engine\, essentially pre-computer economies. And the utopianism there has to do with\, Wow\, look what we can make. We can make new textures\, new colors\, new experiences in the world\, it’s this it’s a kind of a radically and arrogantly humanist utopianism\, associated with those those things. And while it was like the sorcerer’s apprentice kind of went crazy and got out of hand. And it is nonetheless\, I think\, something that you can read as a positive balance as well. Because if you can invent and make and circulate\, throughout the world in a period of 50 years\, is this entirely new substance that changes the the geologic record that introduces\, plastiglomerates where there were none before then you can do other things as well. Right. There is a kind of capacity\, human capacity to invent\, that’s that and that plastic is an effective and a sign of. And I think there are ways to kind of read that utopianism\, which is kind of out of fashion\, I guess I would say into that or out of that substance as well and can recall the the force of our of our own technical abilities and so on. And just like\, there’s a utopian face\, I think\, to like the pandemic\, although of course\, it brought us lots of new plastic waste in the form of masks and gloves\, etc. But part of the utopian thesis you realize like\, Oh yeah\, all of these systems can change. Some of them\, like on a dime\, you can change transport systems. You can change the principles of public that govern public life. You can change the ways that you encounter each other or that you organize your leisure or that you organize your work experience and so on. Those things are not written in stone. The the well known difficulties of getting\, massive numbers of people to cooperate and something that a minority feels is crucial. You know\, those difficulties can be overcome. And so there’s a we just did it\, you know. And\, people complain and blah blah blah. It’s not without strife\, but there’s a utopian aspect to our capacity to\, alter the world. There’s a utopian aspect to anthropogenic changes in that sense. So I think that’s that’s something also that plastic kind of contains as as an option is a kind of knowledge about about malleability\, the continuing malleability of social practice on a global scale. So I guess I would want to think about that include that repertoire of ideas in any conversation about futurity. \nGOOGASIAN [01:21:11]: Yeah\, I think it’s something that unites your comments about utopianism\, here are some of Anne’s comments earlier is this idea that maybe in some ways our utopian thinking about energy is a bit retro\, and that might not be a totally bad thing in the long run. \nIRR [01:21:30]: Well\, you have combined an uneven pieces of development in energy systems\, and you need to be able to layer them all on top of each other. So as you slowly disengage from\, from coal\, for instance\, you shift in another registers. Sometimes you have a rapid development\, you leap ahead\, sometimes not enough. I don’t know if other people. Sorry\, I’ll say this one thing. I don’t know if other people have followed this story about conversions of some of the old British coal mines that have been out of use since the 80s into geothermal energy production sites\, I just think that’s what a cool example of a infrastructure conversion project of green infrastructure because infrastructure can just like sit around and be ruins\, but can also be converted and transformed in a way that’s not just like the depressing cover up\, like making a park out of a pipeline\, passageway. But but you can actually use…flip the way that you think about what that piece of infrastructure is and the capacity that it contains in these interesting ways. So I think they’re like functional utopian conversions also. \nIHEKA [01:22:49]: Yeah\, so very quickly\, I wanted to say that one of the things about futurity is the ability to lead potential for creativity and imagination. But it’s also useful to be in mind that the future is unknowable\, really. I’m thinking about the examples in the 20th century and the utopianism about plastics and how that has turned out today. So I think we want to leave room for contingency aware that we would never really know\, or would never fully know what the future would look like. But again\, that is not an excuse not to try\, but it’s important for us to keep that in view to imagine our ecological future. \nGOOGASIAN [01:23:44]: All right\, well\, since we only have a few minutes left in our in our scheduled time here\, I think let’s all go ahead and hand it over to my colleague Trish\, who’ll share with us some of the questions from our webinar audience here. \nTRISH KAHLE [01:24:01]: And thank you so much\, and thanks to everyone for a really fascinating conversation. In some ways\, you know\, we sort of pre-staged Peter Martin’s question here in the comments about the future. And so since we’ve just discussed that a bit\, I’m going to move on and we have two other sets of questions. And so one I think relates to sort of the metaphors that we’re using to thinking about the relationship between oil and plastics. And that’s about sort of not just sort of being wrapped around the body\, but also seeping into the body\, right\, bringing back particular kinds of toxicity. And so here\, there’s a question here about the violence of oil and you could whether we could discuss the direct localized health implications of oil extraction. And similarly\, right sort of more broadly thinking about not just oil in the context of the Niger Delta\, but also thinking about petrochemicals and other forms of seepage from from plastics and energy infrastructure that have entered our bodies in particular ways. And so since I know that Cajetan has to leave first because he very generously came before teaching\, I’ll sort of asking to start us off and then hopefully we’ll have time to also address Bob’s question in the chat as well. \nIHEKA [01:25:25]: Yeah\, thank you so much for that. In the Niger Delta\, which is the region where I’ve worked\, I think they have different kind of projects imagined to think about the impact of oil. You know\, there is a project Curse of the Black Gold by Michael Watt and Ed Kashi\, it is a multimedia project. And part of it include images of people that have been burnt from fires\, from fire evolving from oil spill in Niger Delta. So you\, you have you have that. There are some that some oral projects to the Niger Delta\, talking about the impact on of oil on women\, on fertility\, or example\, on fertility\, on cancer. But part of the challenge of such projects is also that this the oil company and their promoters they find a way of trying to sow doubt\, trying to ask cause I’ve really proven that this is a direct cause that oil is the direct cause of this. There are problems in Niger environment that’s responsible for some of these problems. Yes. So yes\, the short answer is yes. You know that different forms of projects in different genres trying to capture. But there is a problem of representation too\, for the women\, for the people suffering from cancer. You know\, we it takes time to detect in places like Niger Delta and Nigeria more broadly and even when they do\, until\, towards a terminal stage. It’s not really visible on the body. So that’s a question of problem of representation we’re talking about earlier becomes an issue. But there weren’t fire the victims are fire born\, and that’s really that’s the most dominant trope of representation of oil\, oil issues in the Niger Delta. \nKAHLE [01:27:33]: And I think this question was also directed at you\, Caren\, as well as thinking about petrochemicals and plastics. \nIRR [01:27:41]: Sure. Well\, I guess I was sort of rolling around in my mind and a few examples of narratives because I’m a literature person\, that’s mostly what I have in my mind. Although there’s interesting film things too that are the to follow through on the toxicities\, which it seems to me there’s all kinds of interesting toxicity narratives. I think the question partly had to do with DDT in particular\, which is famously the subject of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring touched\, a crucial touchstone text for any account of American environmental writing and much discussed and kind of thought through. The toxicities\, more recent kind of toxicities narratives that I can think of. They don’t all trace back to the petrochemical extraction processes\, but they’re interested sort of more in these mediating roles. And for some reason\, really blanking on the title of Ruth Ozeki’s novel\, the one that’s about potatoes. It’s it’s has a it’s. \nGOOGASIAN [01:28:49]: All Over Creation. \nIRR [01:28:51]: That’s one. Thank you. Yeah\, that would be a good one to consider in this vein again about pesticides. I think about that book every time I peel a potato\, especially a burbank potato. They’re all clones\, it turns out. So that’s interesting in itself. You know\, so there are these kinds of narratives and a few few others that are going to come back to me in a second. I mean\, certainly you have your kind of Erin Brockovich type projects as well and so on. So I think there are toxicity narratives that are interested\, especially in cancer and cancer clusters\, which is\, cellular level. Joyce Carol Oates has a book about Love Canal\, and that would be interesting there. Building over a waste site\, superfund site\, building housing complex there. So I think that it’s. There is scholarship about illness and the role of the ill body\, Heather Houser’s book on environmental illness is really good on the subject and I think ways in which we have like the the toxic infused human body\, not the monstrous one. You know\, like there were all of these concerns about kind of nuclear monstrosity monster babies\, in the wake of Three Mile Island and so on. But of the\, kind of tragically damaged body created by the exposure to toxicities. Todd Haynes’s Safe\, the film Safe\, would be\, is also a good one of relating to the kind of psychological breakdown that comes with constantly envisioning\, your own future in intoxification. So there’s there’s lots of great resources to work with. And if that’s the question\, there’s interest. Fantastic. I think there’s a lot of take up. What I’m interested in is why the. Why we don’t have a kind of coming together of all of these different micro-level or local toxicities into a big picture account of\, their genesis and that’s that seems like it’s been harder to produce. So even if you think about superfund sites like\, these state funded federal funded projects to renovate areas that were completely poisoned and become unusable\, often through corporate pollution and seepage of oil related and other chemicals that are belong in the Earth. The sites are all separate\, they’re all treated as separate entities. And I think what we what we need is a mapping and an interconnectivity of those sites\, a kind of narrative that allows them to be pulled together into a common story. So that any project that can do that\, I agree\, would be really valuable. \nKAHLE [01:32:13] So\, I am going to give Anne a second to come back in just a second\, but I just wanted to note that Cajetan had to leave to go to teach but we’ll go ahead and sort of wrap ourselves up here\, but I just want to explain why he suddenly disappeared from the webinar. Anne of course\, I sort of had the floor over to you. And then maybe as a final way of wrap up\, we’ll come back to Bob Johnson’s question here about sort of threading the needle in particular pieces of works of art or pieces of literature that you can do. \nPASEK [01:32:48]: Yeah. So on the subject of toxics\, I would venture that you’ll find some interesting and different stuff if you look at the literature and science and technology studies. So books like Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds\, by Sara Ann Wylie are really great. You could also look at Michelle Murphy’s work and Max Libiron. Well\, it seems like there are people thinking across forms of petroleum extraction\, processing and their chemical afterlives or “alterlives”\, as Murphy says. That that are not only like\, very\, very doing good work at sort of drawing connections and thinking about what forms of politics and esthetics are helpful in that conjuncture. But also sort of like\, helping us maybe get over the the purity shock rate of of how do we have our our reaction where we sort of get get through the fact that\, this is a significant shift in in where we mark the boundaries of of clean and dirty or\, contaminated and not. And if we are all to some degree and to very importantly\, differential degrees\, but but to some degree\, all contaminated\, where then do we begin towards building that better future. And on that note\, right\, the subject the prompt about like what some interesting pieces of work have been for thinking towards that. I’ll just make the pitch that it’s it’s good to play around with renewable energy technologies and see how they work. And there are tons of projects that are sort of maker projects or related art projects that are interested in sort of thinking about the rhythms and affects and feelings of solar and wind. I’ve talked a bit about the Solar Protocol website. I think it’s lovely. Branch Magazine is a publication that’s put out by\, I think\, the Mozilla Foundation in part. And they they do the fun thing of they will serve you different esthetics based on the carbon intensity of your local grid. And that’s a changes by the hour. So if you find yourself surfing the internet during peak energy demand time\, you will get image descriptions. But if you come back. In my case\, in Ontario\, during lighter periods where there’s less gas peakers on the grid and it is more nuclear\, solar and wind\, then I will get full images. And it just seems like there there are ways of sort of joining together esthetics\, everyday life and and these cultural idioms to sort of prompt awareness to how energy moves through our worlds\, our our global ecosystems and our day to day energy systems\, as well as like\, what kinds of esthetics might be inappropriate opening for for sort of living more deeply with different kinds of energy forms. And that\, again\, I keep coming back to esthetics less as a sort of critical tool and more as a sort of activist lure\, right. I think it’s a way of bringing people into a project\, making them excited to think new thoughts. And it could be in that kind of generative spirit rather than one purely of just like\, aesthetic critique that we might embark on a new journey. So I’ll leave it there. Thanks. Thanks all for the rich discussion. \nKAHLE [01:36:17]: And I am so sorry that we have to sort of end it here. I do want to if there are any colleagues listening\, I really do encourage using the\, Making Energy Strange work in class. My students worked with Anne’s work and actually tried to replicate it in their own lives to make energy strange\, and it was an incredibly fun and productive exercise. So I just thank you again to and Caren\, Anne and Cajetan\, as well as my colleagues\, my colleagues\, Vicky and Firat and our colleagues here at CIRS. And thank you again all for joining us. \n			\n			\n\n\nResources \n\n				\n				Books 			\n			\n								\nCajetan Iheka\, Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence\, Agency\, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature. Cambridge University Press\, 2017.\nCajetan Iheka\, African Ecomedia: Network Forms\, Planetary Politics. Duke University Press\, 2021.\nCajetan Iheka (ed.)\, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media. Modern Language Association\, 2021.\nCajetan Iheka (ed.)\,  African Migration Narratives: Politics\, Race\, and Space. Boydell & Brewer\, 2019.\nCaren Irr (ed.)\, Life in Plastic: Artistic Responses to Petromodernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press\, 2021. (forthcoming)\nBob Johnson\, Mineral Rites: An Archaeology of the Fossil Economy. Johns Hopkins University Press\, 2019.\nFredric Jameson\, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell University Press\, 1982\nLeo Marx\, The machine in the garden : technology and the pastoral ideal in America. Oxford University Press\, 1964\nMichael Marder\, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. Columbia University Press\, 2013.\nHeather Houser\, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect\, Columbia University Press\, 2016\nSara Ann Wylie\, Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds\, Duke University Press\, 2018.\n\n			\n						\n				Articles  			\n			\n								\nAnne Pasek. “Carbon Vitalism: Life and the Body in Climate Denial.” Environmental Humanities 13\, no. 1 (2021): 1-20.\n\n			\n						\n				Monograpghs/ Novels/ Poetry 			\n			\n								\nFixing Carbon: Mediating Matter in a Warming World – Anne Pasek (forthcoming)\nGain: A Novel – by Richard Powers\nAnatomic – by Adam Dickinson\nThe Age of Plastic – by Craig Santos\nThe First Men in the Moon – by H.G. Wells\nEveryday Oil: Energy Infrastructures and Places That Have Yet to Become Strange – by Anne Pasek\nSilent Spring – by Rachel Carson\nAll Over Creation – by Ruth Ozeki\nThe Falls –  by Joyce Carol Oates\nBranch Magazine\n\n			\n						\n				Podcasts 			\n			\n								\nThe Cultural Lives of Oil –  with Santiago Acosta\nOil\, State\, and Violence – with Victor Ehikhamenor\n\n			\n						\n				Projects/ Films 			\n			\n								\nSolar Protocol \nBlow Up (1966) – by Michelangelo Antonioni\nCurse of the Black Gold: 50 Years Of Oil In The Niger Delta – by Michael Watts\nSafe (1995) – by Todd Haynes
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/everyday-energy-approaches-to-lived-experience/
CATEGORIES:Dialogue Series,Environmental Studies,Panels,Regional Studies
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210329T180000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210329T193000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20210414T060845Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210915T123553Z
UID:10001443-1617040800-1617046200@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:CIRS Faculty Fellow Talk: The Amazingly Idiosyncratic History of Passports by Edward Kolla
DESCRIPTION:When COVID19 hit\, many inveterate travelers like myself were dazed by how quickly something we took for granted had disappeared. Gone\, suddenly\, was our ability to grab our passport\, hop on a plane\, and be in a new country—sometimes even without the hassle of getting a visa. But something else we took for granted\, back in those halcyon days\, was the very need for passports to enjoy international mobility. Though ubiquitous and seemingly all-necessary\, passports are something of a historical fluke. While travel documents of all sorts date back to the start of recorded history\, the story of how we arrived at these little booklets—which\, by the way\, are totally uncodified in international law—is quirky\, complex\, and counter-intuitive. \n\n\n\n\n\nEdward Kolla | The Amazingly Idiosyncratic History of Passports | March 29\, 2021\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nExtra Q&A | The Amazingly Idiosyncratic History of Passports | April 2021\n\n\n\nSpeaker: Eddie Kolla has taught history for 10 years at Georgetown University in Qatar. He has also held research fellowships\, most recently\, at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg\, Germany. His work sits at the intersection of history\, international relations\, and law and includes Sovereignty\, International Law\, and the French Revolution (Cambridge\, 2017).
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/cirs-faculty-fellow-talk-the-amazingly-idiosyncratic-history-of-passports-by-edward-kolla/
CATEGORIES:CIRS Faculty Lectures,Dialogue Series,Regional Studies
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210322T170000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210322T193000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20210411T085509Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240314T072426Z
UID:10001442-1616432400-1616441400@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education Virtual Working Group
DESCRIPTION:On March 22\, 2021\, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) held a virtual working group under a faculty-led research initiative on The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education. This book project is being led by Georgetown University-Qatar’s Professor Karine Walther and Professor Oliver Charbonneau from the University of Glasgow. Over the course of the two-hour meeting\, fourteen scholars participating in this project presented their preliminary chapter abstracts. The assembled group of scholars through their various chapter contributions will be exploring industrial education in different global contexts\, from multi-disciplinary perspectives\, including both historical and contemporary case studies. \n\nLaura Mair’s chapter will be focusing on the ragged schools’ movement in Britain in the mid 19th century that were an Evangelical response to address child poverty. These schools provided impoverished children with a free education delivered by volunteer teachers\, and by 1868 there were approximately 560 ragged schools teaching 50\,000 children. In the earliest years of the movement\, literature suggests that the focus was on providing children with the “three Rs” i.e. reading\, writing\, and arithmetic. But increasingly industrial schooling became a core component of the education offerings at these institutions. Dr. Mair’s chapter will trace the shift towards industrial building that occurred in these ragged movement schools from the 1840s asking whether this shift was financially or ideologically driven. Dr. Mair will also be studying the linkages between industrial education and the emergence of the ragged school emigration scheme\, to shed light on broader social and economic attitudes towards poor children. \n\nJanne Lahti’s chapter will focus on industrial education in native American boarding schools\, and how materiality entangled with ideas of labor in the late-1800s and early-1900s\, propagating and complicating the racial and cultural moorings of the empire. Using examples from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania\, Dr. Lahti will explore how these institutions contested white and indigenous cultures of work\, and became a tool for transforming indigenous students into loyal subjects of the US settler state by transforming them into white workers who embodied white material cultures. \n\nHelge Wendt’s chapter will focus on the industrial education system in Spanish America\, where specialized training programs were established to educate young men in mechanical production processes. The model of training young boys and men was largely similar to other technical and industrial school systems established in other countries in the 19th century. However\, a key element that made it different from the European or American contexts was how it was integrated into agricultural production. Dr. Wendt will study the establishment of specialized educational institutions from different countries of Spanish America\, highlighting the connections with the political\, economic\, and educational contexts of these schools. \n\nElif Akşit’s chapter will focus on the history of industrial schools in the Ottoman Empire and their subsequent continuation in modern Turkey. Dr. Akşit analysis of industrial education in the late Ottoman empire and modern Turkey suggests that they are part and parcel of efforts resisting colonialism\, modernization\, and the transformation from an empire to the republic. The first group of industrial schools were very similar to the ragged schools movement in Britain\, focusing on the education of orphans and involving them in the production of goods for the army. Dr. Aksit aims to study the development of the Girls Industrial Schools in the late Ottoman Empire and Girls’ Institutes in Turkey and explore the question of what is meant by “Industrial” in the western as well as eastern contexts. \n\nThe technical petro-education program at the College of North Atlantic in Qatar is the focus of Danya Al-Saleh’s chapter. She will examine struggles over transferring the national oil industry’s in-house industrial trades education program to a Canadian branch campus in Qatar. The program in question aims to produce enough Qatari men graduates to work as entry level technicians in the industry. However due to racialized labor hierarchies in the Gulf\, it has been a challenge to recruit and retain Qatari students. The situation is further made complex by Qatar’s broader development agenda\, which emphasizes building an educational system for a knowledge-based post-oil international order. Al-Saleh aims to situate this research within the longer history of capitalism and imperialism shaping oil education programs and racialized labor hierarchies across the Gulf. \n\nZahra Babar’s chapter will examine the development and delivery of technical training programs and vocational education in Pakistan over the past three decades. Technical and vocational education have a long history in Pakistan\, and justified on the basis of bridging the gap between the educated and the uneducated poor in the country. Designed to be delivered to the lower income\, rural\, and marginalized communities\, vocational training delivery was increasingly supported by the large rural support programs during the 1980s-1990s. At that period delivering employable skills for lower income communities was tied to the needs of the local labor market. However\, in the 2000s there was a shift in the logic and the design of these programs\, as increasingly government efforts in support of vocational training became specifically tied to migration opportunities for unemployed\, lower income citizens. In this chapter Babar will aim to explore ways in which the social and physical mobility of the poor has always played a central role in shaping Pakistan’s vocational education goals. \n\nBronwen Everill’s chapter will focus on the role of Liberians in promoting projects of industrial schooling in Liberia and around West Africa. Black Americans who migrated to Liberia in the nineteenth century helped to establish various educational enterprises aimed at promoting Christian education and agricultural and industrial education amongst different African communities. By the close of the 19th century Liberians were involved in a variety of imperial projects training African workers in other parts of the continent for plantation labor\, domestic housework\, and for skilled and unskilled industrial labor. She aims to look at ways educational expertise was used to both reinforce and challenge racial hierarchy in the African context. Dr. Everill’s analysis of these programs situates them within transnational imperial collaborations facilitating colonial capitalism’s reach in Africa. \n\nContinuing the theme of African American education\, Julia Bates\, stated that American sociologists played an eminent role in supporting and promoting the industrial education model used at the Tuskegee and Hampton institutes. While sociologist such as Thomas Jesse Jones\, received recognition for their advocacy of this model\, W.E.B. Du Bois’s critique of the model was largely ignored in American sociology. Dr. Bates in her chapter will examine this critique of American sociology of race\, and highlight how the American sociology of race has been intertwined with and supports this model. \n\nHossein Ayazi’s chapter also draws on the Liberian case\, and how the Booker Washington Institute and its core constituencies were able to merge the promise of Black self-government with the prolongation of plantation production under the control of American multinational corporations. Specifically\, in his chapter\, Dr. Ayazi looks to Booker Washington Institute materials\, U.S.-Liberian correspondence regarding the institute and the Firestone rubber plantation\, and social scientific reports that discussed the role of industrial education across Africa. Across these archives\, Dr. Ayazi traces the broader recognition of Liberia’s latent capacity for political and economic self-rule\, as well as the recasting of Liberian self-rule as a condition of techno-scientific advancement in the realm of agricultural production. In other words\, with enough techno-scientific training\, it is (Americo-)Liberians would replace the white Americans that ran the vast colonial bureaucracies of multinational plantation corporations\, and in doing so\, manage their own country\, the world’s second Black Republic. Dr. Ayazi proposes that the Booker Washington Institute and broader shifts in international finance\, plantation production\, and industrial education not only deflected the charge of “colonial slavery” levied against the Firestone in the 1920s and 1930s. By the beginning of the Cold War\, the Booker Washington Institute had also modeled the United States’ counterrevolutionary approach to agricultural and rural development across Africa. \n\nArun Kumar’s chapter focuses on colonial India and Christian missionary schools that promoted and provided industrial education. These missionary schools engineered the concept of work in colonial India\, by teaching that work is not just labor and economic activity but also an ethical and religious activity. Industrial schools were the key institutions through which this discourse of manual labor and work was articulated and practiced. Dr. Kumar chose two school in South India\, which were run by the American Madura Mission\, the American Arcot Mission\, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel\, as case studies\, to address the role of Christian missionaries in building a new discourse of work\, worker and labor by studying the history of their industrial schools. \n\nSarah Steinbock-Pratt’s chapter will study the United States’ efforts at developing industrial education in the Philippines as part of its colonial governance. While the colonial educational officials looked to American schools for black and Indian students as possible models\, industrial education was not the initial focus of the schools in the Philippines. The early years of colonial schooling in the islands centered on English language instruction and primary subjects\, while a wide-ranging debate was held over the type of education that ought to be provided. At the same time\, officials in the US and the Philippines instituted a program to send Filipino students to the United States to study. This program also faced similar questions about whether to provide government scholars with classical or industrial training. Ultimately\, like the colonial educational system itself\, the program was divided between an attempt to win over and Americanize elite Filipinos\, and the perceived imperative to train Filipinos for futures rooted in agricultural development. \n\nIn his chapter Dolf-Alexander Neuhaus will study the role of industrial education before and during the colonial period in Korea (1910-1945)\, with a particular focus on the development of YMCA. The first “Industrial Education Departments” were developed by YMCA and other missionaries in Korea\, to educate the students about industrial labor and capitalism. The missionaries used these departments as a convenient tool for instilling Koreans with a Protestant work ethic\, whereas for the Koreans these were a means to attain civilization and enlightenment. The Japanese Governor-General also supported similar programs to provide industrial education to the Koreans. Neuhaus proposes to explore the intersection between the missionary efforts for industrial education and colonial education policy in Korea. \n\nLukas Allemann’s chapter will study industrial education under the Soviet Arctic sphere\, and on the industrial education programs the USSR provided to the Arctic’s indigenous communities\, namely the Saami people. This chapter will aim to highlight the connection between monoculture and economy\, as well as monoculture and dedication. The economy in the north\, mostly focused on reindeer hurting. Which meant that industrial schooling\, built around a monoculture of education\, went hand in hand with industrial reindeer herding. Monoculture in school also meant focusing on linguistic monoculture and the majority culture\, meaning here the Russian culture. He expressed that this a has significance across regions\, because all circumpolar states did similar things in this respect\, and in this respect\, there is no Iron Curtain. These industrial schools also highlight the ‘Westernness’ of the Soviet Union\, which Dr. Allemann proposes to address. \n\nThe discussion was brought to a close by Joshua Frank Cárdenas\, whose proposed chapter will focus on the origin and founding of D-Q University in his presentation. He explained that D-Q University is a California-based Chicano and Indian college\, founded in response to religious and federal industrial education policies and practices for captive Nations and individuals. For his research he proposes to detail the early origins of industrial education for Americans found at Hampton\, Carlisle\, Perris Indian\, Sherman Indian\, Fort Bidwell and Greenville Indian Industrial Institutes or boarding schools. Cárdenas also aims to examine the nature of California Indian and American Indian communities in 1960s and trace the early struggles of Red Power. \n\nThe authors received feedback on their abstracts\, and engaged in a group discussion on the broader thematic framework for this book project\, and discussed how the various chapters are to speak to each other. Between May and August\, short follow-up virtual meetings will be held where draft papers will be presented and discussed by the group.    \n\nFor the roundtable agenda\, click here.For the participants’ biographies\, click here.For the research initiative\, click here.\n\nParticipants and Discussants: \n\nElif Ekin Akşit\, Ankara University\, TurkeyMaram Al-Qershi\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarDanya Al-Saleh\, University of Wisconsin–MadisonLukas Allemann\, University of LaplandHossein Ayazi\, Williams CollegeZahra Babar\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarJulia Bates\, Sacred Heart UniversityMisba Bhatti\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarJoshua Frank Cárdenas\, California Indian Nations CollegeOliver Charbonneau\, University of Glasgow Ahmad Dallal\, Georgetown University in QatarBronwen Everill\, University of CambridgeArun Kumar\, University of NottinghamJanne Laht\, University of HelsinkiLaura Mair\, University of EdinburghSuzi Mirgani\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarDolf-Alexander Neuhaus\, Free Berlin University Sarah Steinbock-Pratt\, University of AlabamaKarine Walther\, Georgetown University in QatarElizabeth Wanucha\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarHelge Wendt\, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) Berlin\n\nArticle by Misba Bhatti\, Research Analyst at CIRS
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/the-gospel-of-work-and-money-global-histories-of-industrial-education-virtual-working-group/
CATEGORIES:American Studies,CIRS Faculty Research Workshops,Race & Society,Regional Studies
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210321T180000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210321T193000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20210328T104141Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210901T062343Z
UID:10001441-1616349600-1616355000@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:The FIFA World Cup: Football\, Citizenship\, and National Identity 1930-2022
DESCRIPTION:Gijsbert Oonk\, Director of the Sport and Nation research program at Erasmus University Rotterdam\, discussed his study exploring the relationship between national belonging\, acquiring citizenship\, and migration. Taking high profile examples from international sports events\, he sought to unveil the complexities behind the question: who may represent the nation? The historical models of jus sanguine (blood ties) and jus soli (territorial birthright) are well-known markers and symbols of citizenship and nationality. Oonk proposed an ideal-type model of thick\, thin\, and in-between forms of citizenship. \n\nSpeaker: Gijsbert Oonk holds the endowed Jean Monnet chair on Europe in Globalizing World: Migration\, Citizenship and Identity. This chair promotes education and research in the field of Global history\, European studies\, and national identity. The Jean Monnet chairs are an initiative of the European Commission to promote education\, research\, and reflection in the field of European integration studies at higher education institutions. The Sport and Nation research program at Erasmus University Rotterdam focuses on talented athletes with a migrant background within football and the Olympic Games in the context of changing citizenship\, multiple citizenship\, and elite migration. \n\nModerator: Danyel Reiche\, Visiting Associate Professor at GUQ.
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/the-fifa-world-cup-football-citizenship-and-national-identity-1930-2022/
CATEGORIES:Dialogue Series,FIFA World Cup Series,Regional Studies
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210214T180000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210214T200000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20210301T072835Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210901T062414Z
UID:10001440-1613325600-1613332800@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:The Away Game: The Epic Search for Football’s Next Superstars
DESCRIPTION:Reporter Sebastian Abbot discussed his critically acclaimed book\, The Away Game\, which tells the gripping story of a group of boys discovered in what may be the largest talent search in sports history. Over the course of a decade\, an audacious program called Football Dreams held tryouts for millions of 13-year-old boys across Africa looking for football’s next superstars. Led by the Spanish scout who helped launch Lionel Messi’s career at Barcelona and funded by the State of Qatar\, the program chose a handful of boys each year to train to become professionals—a process over a thousand times more selective than getting into Harvard. In The Away Game\, Abbot follows a small group of boys as they are discovered on dirt fields across Africa and join the glittering academy in Doha where they train and compete for the chance to gain fame and fortune at Europe’s top clubs. \n\nSpeaker: Sebastian Abbot is the author of The Away Game: The Epic Search for Football’s Next Superstars\, which tells the story of the largest talent search in football history. The book was a finalist for The Telegraph Football Book of the Year and the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. Prior to publishing the book\, Mr. Abbot spent over a half dozen years working as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press in the Middle East and Asia. He has also worked for over a decade in investment banking and private equity for firms like J.P. Morgan and Affiliated Managers Group. Mr. Abbot has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Princeton University and a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. \n\nModerator: Danyel Reiche\, Visiting Associate Professor at GUQ.
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/the-away-game-the-epic-search-for-footballs-next-superstars/
CATEGORIES:Dialogue Series,FIFA World Cup Series,Regional Studies
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210118T160000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210118T180000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20210125T111850Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240314T072517Z
UID:10001439-1610985600-1610992800@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:A New Political Strategy to Limit Climate Change
DESCRIPTION:Watch the Video\n\n\n \n\nIn this moderated discussion based on his latest book\, Climate Change and the Nation State: The Realist Case\, Anatol Lieven sets out a new political strategy to mobilize support for the effort to limit climate change. He argues that while international agreements and movements are valuable\, in the end\, their purpose is to get states to act\, because (as the pandemic response demonstrated) only states can take the measures and mobilize the resources required. For this to happen\, states and their populations have to be convinced that climate change is not just a threat to humanity in general\, but a danger to the vital interests and the long term survival of their own nations. \n\nBy refocusing the debate about climate change on the national rather than the global level\, Anatol Lieven concentrates on the states and institutions that can take effective action\, and on how mass support for such action can be motivated. This involves a recognition of climate change as an existential threat to existing nation-states and an appeal to progressive nationalism in response. He provides a Realist frame for the threat of climate change and the necessary response to this threat. This response will require radical changes to our economies and societies\, but he reminds us that in the past we have faced and overcome such immense challenges: the total wars of the 20th Century\, and the creation of social programs to civilize industrial society and save capitalism from itself. \n\nLieven shows how in this emergency our crucial building block is the nation-state. The drastic action required to change our societies may be inspired in part by internationalist idealism but can only be carried out by the institutions of effective nation-states\, backed by public legitimacy. This requires different national versions of what has been called the “Green New Deal”: to rebuild social solidarity\, not only in order to justify the sacrifices that will be necessary in the fight to limit climate change but in order to strengthen our societies so as to withstand some damaging effects of climate change that are already inevitable. This will also require new policies to limit migration and deal with the impact of artificial intelligence. \n\nSpeaker: Anatol Lieven is a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and a Fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington DC. He was previously a professor in the War Studies Department of King’s College\, London. He worked for twelve years as a British foreign correspondent\, reporting from South Asia\, the former Soviet Union\, and Eastern Europe for The Times and other publications. His other books include Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (1998);  Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World (2006); America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (2011) and Pakistan: A Hard Country (2012). \n\nModerator: Ahmad Dallal\, Dean\, Georgetown University in Qatar.
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/a-new-political-strategy-to-limit-climate-change/
CATEGORIES:American Studies,CIRS Faculty Lectures,Dialogue Series,Environmental Studies,Regional Studies
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DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20201116T180000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20201116T193000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20201203T065136Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210901T062455Z
UID:10001438-1605549600-1605555000@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:Qatar's Football Journey: From First Games on Sand to Hosting the World as Asian Champions
DESCRIPTION:Qatar has no football history\, or so the critics say. In this moderated lecture\, Doha-born journalist and author Matthias Krug debunks that myth by telling the inside story of the country’s most cherished football and sporting moments and players over the past six decades. \n\nKrug expressed\, “Qatar has become a capital of world sports which will host global football fans in 2022. So in order to gain a full understanding of this development it is important to look at the history and where this rapid development and incredible sports vision has come from.” \n\nSpeaker: Matthias Krug is an author and journalist who was born and raised in Qatar\, where he lives with his family. Matthias has written extensively about football\, society\, politics and culture for over 18 years for some of the biggest publications around the world\, including for the BBC\, CNN\, ESPN\, The Huffington Post\, The Irish Examiner\, Al Jazeera English\, 442\, El Pais\, Arts Monthly Australia\, and many others. His most recent book is titled Journeys on a Football Carpet\, published by HBKU Press in Qatar\, won awards at the International Book Awards and Living Now Awards. His creative short stories have been published in literary magazines across numerous countries. \n\nModerator: Danyel Reiche\, Visiting Associate Professor at GUQ.
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/qatars-football-journey-first-games-sand-hosting-world-asian-champions/
CATEGORIES:Dialogue Series,FIFA World Cup Series,Regional Studies
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DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20201019T170000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20201020T193000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20201125T094405Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240314T072540Z
UID:10001437-1603126800-1603222200@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:Economic Migration to the United States Virtual Working Group
DESCRIPTION:On October 19-20\, 2020\, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) held the second working group for its research initiative on Economic Migration to the US. The virtual meeting brought together scholars who presented draft papers on important themes related to immigration reform\, transnationalism\, education\, and labor market participation and employment. In addition\, several papers provided focused case studies of economic migrants from particular regions such as South Asia\, East Asia\, and Latin America. \n\nThe working group commenced with Payal Banerjee’s paper on “Economic Migration to the US: An Exchange with Data-Capitalism\, Surveillance and Other Considerations in Immigrant Incorporation.” In this paper Banerjee critiques a terminology that frames and conceptualizes international migrants to the US within a bounded idea of “economic.” What constitutes economic migration is informed by broader social and political mechanisms and dynamics. This paper seeks to expand the economic lens and press against it so that it captures the social and historical making of immigrants and their labor contributions in the US. The Banrjee paper suggests that it is essential to address issues of inherent inequality between labor and capital through a structured discussion of capitalism and its new forms. A particular scrutiny of the impact that automation\, digitization\, and surveillance technologies are having on migrants is needed at the current juncture. Banerjee states that new forms of automation\, as well as data capitalism and the algorithms it produces are reshuffling the circulation of capital and influencing immigration management in the country.   \n\nTerry Wotherspoon presented his paper on “International Student Mobility and Settlement\,” stating that until fairly recently there was limited scholarship and policy attention focused on international students as potential future immigrants. In his paper\, Wotherspoon focuses on the relationship between national immigration policies and the aspirations or desires of the students themselves\, and studies the factors that  either facilitate or inhibit students’ permanent settlement. While for the most part international students are still seen by the state primarily as temporary visitors\, policy developments reflect the fact that internationals students have also been considered as a useful means by which to address short-term labor market needs. There is a significant gap between the number of students who express a desire to remain in the host country and those who find employment and actually stay on after completing their studies. The paper looks at various pathways available for international students to facilitate their stay in the US and how this is informed by global trends. \n\nIn his presentation on  “South Asian Migrant Communities and US Politics\,” Sangay Mishra questions the political deficit that temporary migrant workers faces as a result of limitations to political and civic participation that the visa regime imposes on them. The H-1B is essentially a guest worker visa  that is designed around the concept of temporariness. This visa regime produces a democratic and civic deficit in the United States\, as those living and working in the country under this visa category are relegated to non-participation. In the US inclusion and participation are assumed to be privileges available to those who “earn it\,” usually through contributing to the economy and abiding by the system and their legal status for a certain duration of time. However\, for those who remain on the H-1B there is no guarantee of acquiring permanent status or becoming eligible for citizenship\, despite years of staying on US soil. In the empirical section of the article\, Sangay looks at a particular situation that is created for Indian H-1B visa holders when they apply for a green card and the waiting time. \n\nSilvia Pedraza’s paper on “Transnationalism Among Immigrants: Economic\, Political\, Social\,” outlines the various immigrant experiences such as assimilation\, incorporation and transnationalism. Pedraza argues that while immigrants to United States have always demonstrated forms of transnationalism\, current advances of in communication technology have changed the nature and scope of their transnational behaviors. The present day American immigrant lives across two or more nations as well as different time spans\, tied to the past and the present\, in both host and sending country. Pedraza’s paper breaks down the different types of transnationalism that demonstrate distinctly economic\, social\, and political elements. \n\nMin Zhou shared her research on “Contemporary Immigration to the US from East Asia.” Professor Zhou’s paper focuses on the migration of three major ethnonational groups\, Japanese\, Chinese and the Koreans\, and their distinct histories of migration to the United States. Zhou states that while these three groups have their own distinct migration stories\, they are often racialized and treated as single consolidated group in the US. This paper provides an analytical overview of the immigration trends of the three Asian migrant communities\, and how their diasporas have evolved. The paper provides a structured discussion of contemporary trends of cross-border mobility\, socioeconomic characteristics of migration and patterns of social mobility for each of the Asian communities. Zhou suggests that old and new stereotypes have continued to influence the lives and identity formation of East Asian Americans. \n\nIn her presentation of a paper jointly authored with Catelina Amnuedo Dorantes on “The US Visa System without Legislative Change: Growing Complexity and Difference\,” Professor Katherine Donato addressed the issue of variations in the US visa systems across presidential administrations. She maintained that the legal visa systems that were created by the Immigration Act of 1990 remain unchanged and still define the way legal immigrants enter the US. She provided an overview of the visa admission system\, defining its goals\, composition and reforms that have occurred under successive administrations. Using immigrant entry data\, covering the 2002 through 2017 as well as trends in nonimmigrant visa issuances she maintained that visas differ in important ways across various US administrations. The variations have intended and unintended consequences\, which are important for any policy proposals drafted in the future to improve the legal immigration system in the US. \n\nLindsey Lowell continued the discussion on the visa systems by focusing on H-1B visa category. In his paper titled\, “Preferential Hiring and the US Earnings of Skilled Foreign Temporary Workers\,” he maintained that the theory of preferential hiring drives our understanding about sector-specific earnings of H-1B workers. Employers often prefer to hire foreign workers and temporary visa systems such as H-1B offer advantages in hiring and control over employment. In this paper Lindsey proposes that the when it comes to the earnings of H-1B the correct comparison should be to all domestic workers i.e. natives and foreign born. Combing data on H-1B with a large sample of US workers\, full time domestic worker\, Lindsay’s research concluded that while H-1B earn more than native born workers\, their earnings are less than that of domestic workers. \n\nMisba Bhatti addressed the question of degree devaluation with her paper titled\, “Devalued Credentials: Pakistani Female Highly Skilled Migrants in the United States.” This work examines and nuances the experiences of highly skilled women from Pakistan and details the issues they face in the United States in regard to the devaluation of their foreign earned degrees. There is a gender skew with women often being placed at a greater academic or occupational disadvantage than their male counterparts. This is more visible in sectors that hire certain sets of skilled migrants and are usually tipped in favor of male skilled migrants. Likewise\, the foreign credentials of female migrants from South Asia are treated differently\, as that of having lower standards\, than that of women skilled migrants from developed economies.  As a result highly skilled female migrants from developing economies face systematic dual dichotomy when it comes to their foreign earned credential recognition in the U.S. \n\nThe last discussion of the working group was led by Rene Zenteno\, who presented a paper on “Latin American Skilled Workers’ Socio-Economic Integration.” Using data from 1990 to 2018 the paper constructs an updated demographic and provides an understanding of the recent transformations of the Latino immigration to the U.S. The data collected yields a picture of significant changes in the characteristics and qualities of Latino Immigrants as this wave of migration from Latin America declines quickly. The paper states that this  decrease in the flow of Latin immigration has effected student migration largely\, as well as the supplies of high-skilled Latino immigrants. Professor Zenteno also argues that despite changes in cohort quality\, the successful integration of Latino immigrants into the U.S. society is still hindered by the large presence of un-skilled workers\, the lack of a path to legalization\, the low rates of naturalization\, and the ethno-racial profiling of U.S. immigration enforcement. \n\n  \n\nFor the roundtable agenda\, click here.For the participants’ biographies\, click here.For the research initiative\, click here.\n\nParticipants and Discussants: \n\nMaram Al-Qershi\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarZahra Babar\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarPayal Banerjee\, Smith CollegeMisba Bhatti\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarAhmad Dallal\, Georgetown University in QatarKatharine M. Donato\, Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM) – Georgetown UniversityCatalina Amuedo-Dorantes\, University of California\, MercedAnatol Lieven\, Georgetown University in QatarB. Lindsay Lowell\, Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM) – Georgetown UniversitySuzi Mirgani\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarSangay Mishra\, Drew UniversitySilvia Pedraza\, University of Michigan\, Ann ArborElizabeth Wanucha\, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarTerry Wotherspoon\, University of SaskatchewanRené Zenteno\, The University of Texas at San AntonioMin Zhou\, University of California\, Los Angeles\n\nArticle by Misba Bhatti\, Research Analyst at CIRS
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/economic-migration-united-states-virtual-working-group/
CATEGORIES:American Studies,Focused Discussions,Race & Society
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DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20201006T180000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20201006T200000
DTSTAMP:20260405T015035
CREATED:20201008T103218Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210610T074127Z
UID:10001436-1602007200-1602014400@cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu
SUMMARY:The 2022 World Cup in Qatar in Historical Perspective
DESCRIPTION:The FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ breaks new ground—the first World Cup to be held in the Middle East\, the first in a Muslim majority society\, and the first to be held in November. David Goldblatt\, a sociologist\, journalist\, and bestselling author examined the economics\, politics\, and urban development that have accompanied the upcoming event and compared these to past World Cups. \n\nGoldblatt explained\, “The 2006 World Cup in Germany was the first one to have a proper dimension for the environmental aspects of the major sporting event. The 2014 and 2018 World Cup editions had full-scale carbon analysis. 2022 is genuinely different. The commitment of the Qatari government towards the environment is really noteworthy for a carbon-zero event. The seriousness towards this commitment is seen in the construction as well as in the public transport arrangements for the World Cup.” \n\nSpeaker: David Goldblatt\, is an honorary fellow at the International Centre for Sports History and Culture\, De Montfort University\, Leicester\, U.K.\, teaches for the Geneva based Football Business Academy\, and is a visiting Professor at Pitzer College\, Los Angeles. \n\nModerator: Danyel Reiche\, Visiting Associate Professor at GUQ.
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/2022-world-cup-qatar-historical-perspective/
CATEGORIES:FIFA World Cup Series,Regional Studies
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