Presented by EnviroLab, Department of Anthropology

EnviroLab’s Graduate Conference is a biennial event that gathers a community of graduate students and faculty working on environmental research projects. This year, the conference theme is (Un)Doing Catastrophe.

Catastrophe is both material and epistemic, and so must be the questions. Together, we ask: How do we rethink 'catastrophe' so as to find new ways of being and acting in the world(s) we inhabit? How can 'catastrophe' be untied from notions of calculability, prediction, and control that organize 'modern' institutions? How have communities, individuals, social movements, places, and histories remade life after catastrophe?

Please join us for this two-day conference, featuring four panels and a keynote delivered by Professor Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins University). 

Full conference details.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

DAY 1

PANEL 1

Discussant: Raja Swamy, University of Tennessee
Chair: Ramah McKay, UPenn

• Alejandra Osejo Varona, Rice University
  “Imagine a Colombian River Full of Hippos: Modeling Risk and Invasion in the Aquatic Environments”
• Md Tasnim Islam Patwary, Texas Technical University
  “Water as Catastrophe: Governmentality and Amphibious Life in the Bengal Delta”
• Alessandra Dominguez, UPenn
  “Histories of Resilience and Risk: Oasis Agriculture in the Face of Cultural and Climatic Change”
• Rowan Claire Choe-Maher, UCLA
  “The Way Out is Always Through: Redeeming Ecological Catastrophe through Technical Futurity in the (Post)Soviet Periphery”

PANEL 2 

Discussant: Joshua Moses, Haverford College
Chair: Emily Ng, UPenn

• Uthman Khan, University of Alberta
  “Vibrating Through Catastrophe: Affective Resonance, Institutional Dissonance”
• Elena Sobrino, Tufts
  “Fatigue and the Politics of Closure: Testing the Limits of Modernist Crisis Management in the Flint Water Crisis”
• Sehdia Mansaray, UNC
  “Harvest Time in the Sine-Saloum Delta”
• Shahram Sarwar Abbas, University of Michigan
  “The Future is Already Past: The Weight of Time under a Changing Climate”

KEYNOTE

Anand Pandian, Johns Hopkins

DAY 2

PANEL 3

Discussant: Andrea Marston, Rutgers
Chair: Kristina Lyons, UPenn

• Paolina Lu, UC Davis
  “Coping with Catastrophe: Skill, Distinction, and Interspecies Intimacy with Tai Dam Foragers in Des Moines”
• Hechen Liu, CUNY
  “Out of Coal?: Precarity, Youth, and Ecological Governance in a Chinese Company Town”
• Juan José Lopez, Vanderbilt
  “Mediating Ecological Simplification: Parade flowers and coffee cultivation in Jacaltenango, Guatemala”
• Ran Mei, NYU
  “No Little Plans for Pork: Architecture, Infrastructure, and the Urban Futures of China’s Pig Production”

PANEL 4

Discussant: Marisa Solomon, Barnard
Chair: Deb Thomas, UPenn

• Amrina Rosyada, Northwestern
  “God in Garbage: Mapping Piety onto Waste Infrastructure in Urban Indonesia”
• Lilith Frakes, UC Santa Cruz
  “Catastrophe as Nature’s Laboratory: Primate Hybridization, Evolution, and the Undoing of Purity in the Anthropocene”
• Kaylani Hocog Manglona, UPenn
  “Catastrophic Revelation: Ancestral Jurisdiction and Nuclear Atmospheres in the Pacific Marianas”
• Zachary La Rock, MIT
  “Curative Malaise: Science, Magic, and Unsettlement in an Agricultural Epidemic”