Reckoning, Repairing, Reworlding: The (In)humanities, Artistic Practices, and Planetary Crisis

July 14, 2022 from 16:15 to 17:30

Room Number: TRS 1-075

Join the Meeting: https://ryerson.zoom.us/j/95774501937?pwd=Nmk3WEFrVGhpNnhkT1dteFAxTHFhQT09

Chair: Susie O’Brien (McMaster U)

Speakers:

Jesse Arsenault (Concordia U), “The Insect Poetics of Planetary Crisis”

Susan Spearey (Brock U), “Nurturing what might still be:” interrupting transgenerational trauma, disrupting legacies of wastelanding, and enacting reparative reworlding in Michael Christie’s Greenwood

Helene Strauss (U Free State), “Dangerous, Ugly Air’: documentary activism, extractive trauma, and the aesthetics of respiration in Dying for Gold”

Paper Summaries:

Jesse Arsenault (Concordia U), “The Insect Poetics of Planetary Crisis”

The paper looks at insect narratives to offer a “meditation on the possible forms organismic and societal symbiosis can take” in multispecies worlds with uncertain futures (Jackson 2020, p. 128). The paper examines the mutual vulnerability of human and pestiferous life to animate strategies for survivability and multispecies flourishing.

Susan Spearey (Brock U), “Nurturing what might still be:” interrupting transgenerational trauma, disrupting legacies of wastelanding, and enacting reparative reworlding in Michael Christie’s Greenwood

This paper reads Michael Christie’s 2019 multi-generational family saga Greenwood in dialogue with Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016); examining how Greenwood maps intergenerational devastations and resurgences in both human and non-human worlds around what Haraway describes as “intentional kin making across deep damage and significant difference” (2016).

Helene Strauss (U Free State), “Dangerous, Ugly Air’: documentary activism, extractive trauma, and the aesthetics of respiration in Dying for Gold”

This paper considers how the documentary film Dying for Gold (dir. Meyburgh and Pakleppa, 2018) disrupts the South African mining industry’s historical manufacture of multiple intersectional traumas. The paper locates in the film’s complexly layered ‘respiratory aesthetics’ important lessons for redrawing lines of non-extractive relational interdependence.