 | In this special Earth Month Newsletter, we are pleased to introduce some of the Humanities Institute's sustainability initiatives. In the 2020 academic year, we will begin our new biennial theme, "The Humanities in the Environment/The Environment in the Humanities". In support of our upcoming theme and efforts, we are pleased to announce that the Humanities Institute has received a grant from the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to host a Global Humanities Institute on “Climate Change and Problems of Scale.” Tying in with our new theme, we are pleased to invite our community to a virtual edition of Controversy & Conversation, featuring a film screening of Minimalism, co-hosted by the Austin Public Library and the UT Office of Sustainability as a part of their virtual Earth Month activities. The screening will include an online discussion facilitated by Fashion Anonymous. In collaboration with our Austin Public Library partners, we have created a blog post with a selection of environmental films available through APL's and UT's streaming platform, Kanopy. We also share details about a webinar featuring a timely lecture by Dr. John Barry on "Hope, Agency and Transformation: Lessons from the Coronavirus Pandemic and Tackling our Planetary Emergency." We include an announcement of our 2020-22 Faculty Fellows Seminar Call for Applications on the new theme (with an extended deadline). Finally, we share other news on Health Humanities and COVID-19, including information on The Pandemic Project, an expressive writing initiative started at UT; details on a coronavirus resource website prepared by the librarian at Dell Medical School; and an update on our Poetry in the Time of Coronavirus blog project. We close with a recently posted poem by Dan Gerber. Please read below to learn more about these initiatives, and stay safe. |  (L to R) Professors Katherine Lieberknecht (Architecture), Heather Houser (English), Phillip Barrish (English), Lourdes Rodríguez (Population Health), Eric Klinenberg (NYU), and Pauline Strong (Anthropology) at HI's Fall 2018 Difficult Dialogues / Planet Texas 2050 Public Forum | The Humanities Institute has been awarded a grant from the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), located at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The grant, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is for the purpose of conducting a Global Humanities Institute (GHI) in the Summer of 2021. The “Climate Justice and Problems of Scale” Institute will be the fifth GHI funded through the CHCI-Mellon partnership. The project is a collaboration between UT Austin’s Humanities Institute and five other CHCI member programs, including the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (University of Pretoria), the Sydney Environmental Institute (University of Sydney), the Center for American Studies and Research (American University of Beirut), the Institute for Humanities Research (Arizona State University), and the Humanities Center (Carnegie Mellon). Three or four scholars from each participating university are collaborating in organizing the GHI’s activities. The Summer 2021 Global Humanities Institute is scheduled to be held at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and will convene 18 senior scholars along with 18 early-career scholars from around the world for a 10-day conference. It will also include keynote addresses from renowned scholars in the field. The Institute will consider issues such as how matters of scale fundamentally shape understandings of climate change and its effects at specific times and places; how "scale literacy” can identify the sources and attributes of climate injustice; and how narratives, activist frameworks, and planning strategies might promote collective action to mitigate climate change, more evenly distribute the impacts of climate disruption, and work towards climate justice. During the 2020-21 and 2021-22 academic years, the Humanities Institute will also host a related Faculty Fellows Seminar on the theme of “The Humanities in the Environment/The Environment in the Humanities.” The Humanities Institute will also collaborate with the University of Texas’s “Planet Texas 2050” grand challenge initiative. Several members of the PT2050 team are among the GHI organizers, including Heather Houser (associate professor of English), Katherine Lieberknecht (assistant professor of architecture), and Adam Rabinowitz (associate professor of classics). “The Humanities Institute is honored to lead an international group of humanities scholars investigating how people are responding to the scale of climate change. Global collaborations on the impact of climate change and on the challenges of scale are more important than ever at this unprecedented time,” said principal investigator Pauline Strong, professor of anthropology and director of the Humanities Institute. To learn more about the Humanities Institute's 2020-22 theme and Seminar, please contact Dr. Strong (pstrong@austin.utexas.edu) or Program Coordinator, Kathryn North (knnorth@austin.utexas.edu). More information about the Faculty Fellows Seminar application can be found on the HI resource page and in the CfA below. | Thursday, April 23, 2020
6:30-8:00 PM
Virtual Screening on Netflix Party To join us for this special Earth Month screening, please register in advance to receive instructions and a link to the film. Please note that a Netflix subscription is required.
How might your life be better with less? Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things examines the many flavors of minimalism by taking the audience inside the lives of minimalists from all walks of life—families, entrepreneurs, architects, artists, journalists, scientists, and even a former Wall Street broker—all of whom are striving to live a meaningful life with less. From director Matt D'Avella, Minimalism had the largest indie documentary box-office opening of 2016. Watch the Trailer | The screening will begin at 6:30 PM, and will include an online conversation facilitated by Ashlee Bushee and other members of Fashion Anonymous. Fashion Anonymous is a UT Austin student-led organization whose mission is to encourage positive change and instill behavior habits that will benefit not only you but others, society, and the environment. Open to anyone interested in sustainability, they aim to encourage and help members of the Austin community to be more conscientious consumers. United by their passion for fashion, FA organizes initiatives that help others learn and understand the impact the fashion industry has on minority groups, the environment, society, and the economy. Fashion Anonymous was co-founded by Ashlee Bushee, a UT Austin Master's of Education student focusing on STEM curricula. In addition to her activism work, Ashlee studies climate change and sustainability communication policy. Ashlee, along with Doran Kim, Anai Moreno, and Megan Schuetz of the Fashion Anonymous team, will be answering audience questions during the screening. Doran Kim, a creative director at Fashion Anonynous, is a Textile and Apparel major minoring in Entreprenership at UT Austin. Anai Moreno is a recent Public Relations graduate from UT with a concentration in Textiles and Apparel and Cultural Anthropology. Megan Schuetz is a Senior majoring in Merchandising and Consumer Sciences at UT Austin and a co-founder of Fashion Anonymous. | This April 2020 screening is an experimental version of the Controversy & Conversation program -- a collaboration between the Humanities Institute's Difficult Dialogues Program and the Austin Public Library. We hope to return to our regular documentary screenings at the Terrazas Branch of the Austin Public Library soon. Please see the blog post below to read about more environmental films available through APL's and UT's. streaming platform, Kanopy. Sponsored by the Humanities Institute, the UT Office of Sustainability as part of their virtual Earth Month activities, the Austin Public Library, and Fashion Anonymous. | Since 2015, the Austin Public Library has partnered with the University of Texas Humanities Institute to present the Controversy & Conversation Documentary Film Series. On the first Thursday of each month, an award-winning documentary film on a controversial social topic of the day is screened at the Terrazas Branch of the Austin Public Library and is followed by a community discussion of the issue. Each season, the APL/HI team chooses 5 or 6 films to screen, and directors of the documentaries or community leaders are frequently present to participate in the discussion and answer questions. Now in its sixth year, the Controversy & Conversation Program has shown over 50 films and has featured guest speakers from local and international organizations such as the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, Austin Justice Coalition, Circle of Hope International, Common Cause Texas, Keep Austin Fed, People’s Community Clinic, SAFE Austin, and Texas After Violence Project. In a collaborative blog post posted on our blog site, the organizing team of the Controversy and Conversation Documentary Film Series has compiled a list of recommended environmental films available to view through Kanopy, an on-demand video streaming platform for public and academic libraries. With thousands of titles, Kanopy is available to Austin Public Library cardholders and to University of Texas students, staff and faculty. | Wednesday, April 22, 2020
1:00-2:30 PM
Zoom Webinar (registration required) For Earth Day, Dr. John Barry will webcast a talk entitled "Hope, Agency and Transformation: Lessons from the Coronavirus Pandemic and Tackling our Planetary Emergency" from Queen's University Belfast. This talk is hosted by the Institute for Historical Studies and will take place as a webcast. Please email cmeador@austin.utexas.edu to register. Abstract:
We have been here before. Massive social and economic disruption. Rapid and massive intervention by states around the world to minimize or prevent social disaster. Except it was the 2008-09 global financial crisis where states bailed out the banks. In the wake of that crisis there was a lot of talk about, and an opportunity for a ‘green new deal,’ using the various stimulus packages being proposed by states to usher in a step change in the economy, encompassing a low carbon, inclusive agenda for a different economy. But it failed. Now states have been forced to ‘bail out the people,’ leading to them effectively implementing a ‘basic income’ for workers to compensate them for staying at home, to nationalize all public health resources within their jurisdictions, and to inject trillions of dollars in ‘quantitative easing for the people’ as an emergency measure. Vital though these state interventions are, this emergency and stabilization strategy by states needs also to move onto thinking about what a post-pandemic economy looks like. Is it a return to the ‘status quo ante,’ a completely understandable ‘back to normal’ desire, or should we also be thinking of ‘building back better’? About the Speaker:
John Barry is Professor of Green Political Economy in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen's University Belfast. He has written or edited numerous books, articles and book chapters on green political theory; the political economy of unsustainability; the green movement; the politics, economics and policy of the transition to a low carbon economy; republicanism and green politics; eco-feminism; interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability research; and academic activism, among other topics. His most recent book, The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability: Human Flourishing in a Climate-Changed, Carbon Constrained World, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. He is a former co-chair of the Green Party in Northern Ireland, a sitting Green Party Councillor, a founding member of Holywood Transition Town, a director of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (Ireland), and co-founder of two think tanks, Green House and the Centre for Progressive Economics. He is winner of the PSA Mackenzie Prize for best politics book of 1999. To sign-up and receive the Zoom webinar URL, please email Courtney Meador (cmeador@austin.utexas.edu). Visit the IHS event page for further details. Sponsored by the Center for Sustainable Development in the School of Architecture, the Humanities Institute, Texas Global Classrooms, the Center for European Studies, and the Institute for Historical Studies in the Department of History. | “The Humanities in the Environment/The Environment in the Humanities” Extended Application Deadline: Friday, May 15, 2020 The Humanities Institute, with the support of the College of Liberal Arts and participating Schools and Colleges, invites faculty to apply for an appointment as a Humanities Institute Faculty Fellow for a two-year tenure beginning in fall 2020. With the theme of “The Humanities in the Environment/The Environment in the Humanities,” the Humanities Institute launches an inquiry centered in the emerging discipline of the environmental humanities, with both “the humanities” and “the environment” understood broadly. We aim to consider new ways to think with and complexify notions of “human,” “nature,” and “environment,” and welcome inquiries into human/environmental entanglements in the past, present, and future. We seek proposals grounded in such fields as environmental history, environmental ethics, environmental justice, environmental health, environmental education, ecocriticism, architecture, science and technology studies, and feminist and queer geographies, among others. Topics may range from social and cultural dimensions of climate change and resource depletion to utopian and dystopian fiction, indigenous and postcolonial cosmologies, generational politics, challenges of scale, and hope and despair, to mention just a few. The centerpiece of the Fellows program is the Faculty Seminar, which will meet for three hours weekly during both long terms of the calendar year 2021, with individual Fellows participating during either the spring or the fall. The Faculty Fellows Seminar allows faculty from across the University to share work from diverse disciplinary perspectives around a common theme. Participants usually find that the feedback and advice they receive on their work, combined with the general intellectual stimulation the seminar provides, enables them to make progress on their own research agendas while also forming collegial relationships that persist for years after the seminar has ended. In addition, Faculty Fellows invite several distinguished visitors to campus to lead sessions of the seminar and deliver public lectures in the Institute’s Distinguished Visiting Lecture series, which will be held across the 2020-21 and 2021-22 academic years (travel restrictions permitting). Applications are accepted from across the University, with the approval of the Chair of the applicant’s department. Past Fellows are welcome to apply. Successful applicants are appointed as Humanities Institute Fellows for 2020-2022, and receive a one-course teaching load reduction for either Spring 2021 or Fall 2021. During the semester of the course reduction, each Faculty Fellow is expected to attend the Faculty Fellow Seminar weekly, and to lead one session on their ongoing research related to the theme. The Seminar will close with a Faculty Fellows Symposium in Spring 2022. (See a report on the Spring 2020 Symposium here.) Information on past seminars and Distinguished Visiting Lectures is available on the Institute’s web site, which also includes a roster of former Faculty Fellows. Applications for a Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship must include three documents, preferably combined into one PDF file: (1) a current curriculum vitae, (2) a 2-3 page statement describing the nature of the interest, expertise, and/or current project that you would bring to the seminar, and indicating whether you would be available to participate in Spring 2021, Fall 2021, or (ideally) in either semester; and (3) an HI Seminar Participation Agreement form, signed by you and your department chair (a DocuSign signature is fine). Please read the agreement form carefully before signing it. Application forms for the 2020-22 Faculty Fellows Seminar are available here, and completed applications should be sent to knnorth@austin.utexas.edu. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the application deadline has been extended to May 15, 2020. For more information, please contact Institute director Pauline Strong at pstrong@austin.utexas.edu, or program coordinator Kathryn North at knnorth@austin.utexas.edu. | Health Humanities and COVID-19 The ability of the humanities to forge and sustain connection is more important than ever at a time of “social distancing” and “self-isolation.” We close this newsletter with information on how Health Humanities colleagues are supporting our community in this difficult time. Feel free to share these resources with others! Pandemic Project: Colleagues from the UT Psychology department led by Dr. Jamie Pennebaker have created The Pandemic Project, which includes a number of writing prompts and information on using expressive writing to counteract anxiety and improve overall health. Our colleagues invite you to participate in the narrative project and also to take the Project's COVID Social Psychological survey, which provides you with a tailored analysis and recommended guidance based on your responses. Library Resources: We would like to bring to your attention an excellent COVID-19 resource page developed by UT Dell Medical School Librarian, Imelda Vetter. Also, along with Gina Bastone (Humanities Librarian for English Literature and Women's & Gender Studies), Imelda has developed a Health Humanities resource site. HI Blog Poetry Project: We invite our readers to visit the Thinking in Community blog to read our ongoing series, Poetry in the Time of Coronavirus. All of the poems shared with the Health Humanities community have been added, and we will continue to post poems every few days. | We close with at poem by Dan Gerber. This poem has been included in the Poetry in the Time of Coronavirus series. Often I Imagine the Earth
by Dan Gerber Often I imagine the earth
through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of—
atoms, peculiar
atoms everywhere—
no me, no you, no opinions,
no beginning, no middle, no end,
soaring together like those
ancient Chinese birds
hatched miraculously with only one wing,
helping each other fly home. (first published in Poetry Magazine, March 2010) | The Humanities Institute's Newsletter is edited by Kathryn North, Administrative Program Coordinator. For more information on the University of Texas Humanities Institute, please visit our website. To contact us, please write to Kathryn at knnorth@austin.utexas.edu. | | |
