coe205_intersectional-ecologies.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Hello, coaches of energy listeners. It's very dark days in Ukraine, and you know, I'm looking out here at the Houston skyline and there there are some lights on buildings that are kind of an orange gold color and blue. And I'm like, is that some kind of recognition or is that just is that like baseball colors? I'm not sure. What do you think? How's everyone? By Dominic Boyer?

Speaker2: [00:00:48] Hey, how are you doing?

Speaker1: [00:00:49] I'm doing great.

Speaker2: [00:00:51] We're in different places right now. For listeners, I'm again in Los Angeles at the moment, and I saw a very, very well appointed tunnel today that had all the Ukrainian lights in it. It looked actually really beautiful. So I'm not sure how Houston is doing. I feel like it could be that they just got the colors wrong because they might be some confusion about the Ukrainian flag. I don't know.

Speaker1: [00:01:12] Oh, so you think that L.A. is doing it better than Houston, in other words, recognizing the sovereignty of this little country?

Speaker2: [00:01:19] It is more of a creative industry town when you get right down to it. I think that they just have a better comprehension of lighting.

Speaker1: [00:01:25] Well, now I have to go and really check the colors here. I mean, I don't know. It's kind of a gold in a blue. But as you know, isn't that the color of our baseball team or something? I think it

Speaker2: [00:01:35] Is. That's orange. I think the Astros, I think that's an orange color.

Speaker1: [00:01:39] It's a it's a meal. Trust me, this is like a medial like sort of betwixt in between orange and yellow. So I'm going to pretend that it's not the baseball team. I'm going to pretend just, you know, just to make myself feel better.

Speaker2: [00:01:53] Probably like, do you think, do you think we can get away with like using half Astros colors and half yellow,

Speaker1: [00:01:59] Something like, Oh my God, and we had I mean, I've just been sort of trying to do my work while not totally obsessively following the news there, but it's pretty grim. There's also been some good reporting to like, you know, the whatever United States and the media here is very focused on it for very, very good reasons. But then there's been some very valid pushback about whether this much attention, this kind of fine grained attention is given to the many other wars that the United States has instigated and been part of, or even if we haven't been part of them, has it been given the attention that it might have in Syria or Afghanistan, et cetera, because it's like it's kind of a blow by blow, you know, people on the streets and this woman and her child are getting on the train, and it's quite dramatic and it's very, very disturbing. And what's particularly disturbing is, I think hearing about martial law and also these citizen brigades, the territorial defense brigades where people are just going and picking up rifles and getting trained for like 48 hours and they're like, OK, now I'm going to go defend the homeland. I mean, can you imagine you would you would have been stuck like you wouldn't have been able to cross the border if you have been if you're a Ukrainian citizen, you would have been stay in there. Dominic Boyer.

Speaker2: [00:03:17] I'm well aware, I'm well aware, and I think the refugee numbers are up over six hundred thousand now in Poland and other countries. So it's just it's a tragedy. It's terrible, it's just terrible. And I'm glad to see that there's a spirited defense. But war is always terrible, and I just I can't really get past that part of it. It's, you know, I guess you have to inform yourself and know what's going on, but at some level, it's just always a tragedy. So there it is.

Speaker1: [00:03:46] Yes, it is. And so OK. So we don't want to be too. We don't need to be too bleak. Here we do. I mean, appropriately, please. Hopefully, there is. There is some resolution,

Speaker2: [00:03:57] Respectfully bleak and happy that Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, the friend of our friend John Gardner, is actually, I think, having his best moment as head of state. So I don't know, maybe maybe he will unite the Ukrainians and they will their resistance will endure. But I wanted to suggest that maybe before we move on to our guests that we each try to share one lighthearted story Can we do that? Can we each tell one? I've got a funny thing that happened to me today. I can share just as a way of diversifying the emotional palette here, a little bit. So the building that my office is in, it's called the Bradbury Building and it's a building in downtown L.A. And if I have said this already, forgive me that it's kind of a pretty remarkable late 19th century building with a lot of pretty amazing iron work in it, and it's on the architecture tour. And so tourists are trying to get in here, blah blah blah. Well, they also do a lot of film shooting and music video shooting here and today. The entire day they were shooting a sunglasses commercial right outside my window. And the first thing and this is the funny part, the first thing I hear as these people are setting up. At first I was like, maybe they're just shooting some B-roll for a movie or something. But no, it was like, like maybe like seven or eight models and a production and support team that must have been like 30 people easily. It was pretty huge. I mean, a lot of people in here wandering around taking pictures with with about 30 different types of single. I says, as far as I could tell, and at one point, there's this older gentleman, I would say, you know, salt and pepper era, a gentleman who's standing there and he's supposed to kind of look off into the distance and the note the director gives him as, yeah, just, you know, just think about just think about how much money you made in bitcoin today. It's a little callback to what you were talking about last week, too. So yeah,

Speaker1: [00:05:45] Well, yeah, that's how that's how I cheer myself up to as I think about all the cash I'm making out with bitcoin, all

Speaker2: [00:05:52] Of the cryptocurrencies that we forgot to buy because we didn't really know what they were or trust them or something like that, all of that imaginary wealth.

Speaker1: [00:06:00] That's that's my side gig.

Speaker2: [00:06:01] But anyway, so it's fun to be kind of in the middle of a shooting every once in a while, the peer inside the windows at us and like, What are these people doing in here? Like, you know, as though we were somehow disturbing them?

Speaker1: [00:06:09] Well, that's that's I don't I don't know if I have anything that can compete with that glamour, but I did have an actually a really nice moment. Yesterday, I was taking a spin around campus because I walked walk the perimeter with students or buddies or whoever is willing to go and do the walk. And yesterday was a beautiful, sunny day and there's a piece of, I mean, it's a piece of art. It's rather tall. It's probably, I don't know, 50 feet tall and it's kind of sculptural, but it's these transparent color blocks near one of the residential colleges and right near the loop, the walk, the walking loop or the walkway is. And I've seen this art before. I never really paid much attention to. It was never super impressed with it as an object. But yesterday, as I was walking, the Sun was shining through it in the way that it's meant to. And it was casting all of this purple lights like all this purple refracted light all over the ground. And I looked over and I was like, Oh my God, it's the ground covered in purple spray paint. Like it was so dramatic and so opaque, and its color and I went over and stood in it. And then it created a shadow and I was like, No, it's the art. The art is doing its thing. And it was such a discovery that because I've been by it a million times, and I'm sure I've been by it on days when it was actually shining through like it was like it was meant to be. But it's like, I finally, I finally got the purpose of the art, and I identified that that shimmering color square am I walking partner was quite impressed, too, because she's been at rice for over 20 years and she's never noticed it before. So we felt like we felt like real heroes. Or I don't know. I mean, maybe it's not a well-designed piece of art because because it takes that long to notice it, but we were just very tickled with this encounter with the art that had never happened.

Speaker2: [00:08:07] It's like a Halley's Comet thing we're like once every seventy six years you can encounter the art, right? I mean, that's actually kind of bold. It's a long now sort of thing.

Speaker1: [00:08:15] Yes, yes. And maybe that is maybe that's the refraction moment is, yeah, every fifty thousand years you get the light shining through in the proper way. So that was my sunglasses story, I guess, such as

Speaker2: [00:08:27] Humble offerings, dear listeners, to to change the mood ever so slightly. Art exists. Laughter exists. Not all is right in the world. We're not saying that. But yet there is still much in the world to love and that loves you. So on that note, we have three, not one, not two, but three terrific guests today.

Speaker3: [00:08:49] With us, we had a conversation about

Speaker2: [00:08:52] Intersectional ecologies, together with Bridget Gorski, Amelia Moore and Sarah Vaughan, who have published this remarkable article in annual review of anthropology that focuses on intersectional ecology. And we thought it was a really good topic to get into, and we talk with them not only about that article, but about their own very, very fascinating work. So there's a lot in this episode to like and hope you're going to enjoy digging into it. Do you have anything else to say? Sim, what other thoughts on that?

Speaker1: [00:09:25] No other than they're just all three of them. Brilliant, and it was really fun to get to talk to them. And somehow we managed to get a pretty good conversation in a short amount of time, even though there were five of us. But I think it's a super dynamic, intersectional discussion about this new concept that they've developed. And yeah, all right.

Speaker2: [00:09:44] It's great. Let's why don't we move on to that then and just hope that the rest of the world is in a better place next week? What do you say?

Speaker1: [00:09:51] Ok, that's I like that. That's a very that's very nice, very optimistic, very glass half term. And it's a very pretty moment to launch into this great conversation where I get to now say, Go Bridgette, go Amelia and go Sarah.

Speaker3: [00:10:27] Welcome back, everyone, to the Cultures of Energy podcast, we are delighted, thrilled to have with us today Bridget Gorski, Amelia Moore and Sarah Vaughan. We're talking intersectional ecologies. I'm going to turn it over to Simone, OK?

Speaker1: [00:10:41] Hi, Amelia. Sarah and Bridget is so great to have you on the podcast, and we wanted to start by talking about this fantastic article that you have co-written and published together in the annual review of Anthropology. The HRA, which is a really prestigious place for conversations and our discipline where we kind of go through and look at the important works in a particular sub field and generate real conversations about what's happening next in this in these areas of debate and conversation and our discipline. And this one, the piece that you've written, brings up a really important, I think, an extremely important intervention under the rubric of a concept you call intersectional ecologies. And so the article is called Intersectional Ecology is reimagining anthropology and environment. And so the first question that I wanted to ask was how you came together to think the practice of intersectional ecology. What were the kinds of underpinnings that brought you into this collaboration together and into the co authorship project?

Speaker4: [00:11:43] Well, I can get us started. We initially just got together to form a reading group. And my understanding from Bridget and Sarah was that they'd had some unsatisfying interactions with some other reading groups that they'd been involved in. Because sometimes in our fields, as we all know, this can be very performative spaces and not actually spaces to really get into the meat of the content. Or they can be kind of, I don't know, like captured by particular people in personalities. And so you don't really feel comfortable talking about the things that interests you if you don't feel like there's, you know, relevant enough. And Bridget and Sarah like, correct me because I wasn't involved in those in those other spaces, but I think we had kind of got to talking at a Triple A and decided, you know, wouldn't it be fun to actually be in a reading group with people who you felt like you could speak freely to and that you weren't being condescended to and who weren't, you know, steering conversations in ways that ungenerous ways? I don't know. I don't know if that's the way to assess it. So, you know, we just got together and decided that we were going to read a couple of things together and see what happens. And eventually, this article happened, amongst other things. And it was a really kind of fortuitous, unexpected, completely wonderful and totally welcomed event in our in my life, at least.

Speaker5: [00:13:23] Yeah. So I would say that a another thing that got me really interested in us doing a writing group together was this idea of having these AAA panels. So we came together also with Page West, Laura Ogden and some other colleagues. And these AAA panels were just opportunities to, you know, ask people about what they thought about environmental anthropology. Why did they find themselves in the space as opposed to other subfields within the disciplines, say political anthropology or area studies focus? And a lot of the feedback and the debates that happened at those triple panels certainly got me fired up and interested in having this ongoing reading group. So that was also kind of inspirational for me.

Speaker1: [00:14:05] I can't remember the year exactly, but I know that the first coming together happened out of the race in Minnesota, in Minneapolis. So whenever that was, maybe five years ago or so and we began very slowly having this reading group together, it was just such a joy to read things and get to discuss them and then slowly built into holding our first Triple A roundtable. I think it was. I think we started informally and we really wanted to know what people thought about citations and practices that we started with the question about who's siting who and how can we diversify citation practice within environmental anthropology. We were shocked by how many people came to that roundtable, and a number of them were graduate students. And we asked at the end, What can we do to support you? And they said, write something that we can use when we're preparing our exams so that when we're bringing this approach and these ideas to an environmental anthropology are advisors understand that this is an actual this is an intervention that's happening. And out of that work, we slowly built toward the intersectional ecology article at. Was it immediate, but we eventually got there, and we're just delighted, and I think also it is a surprise.

Speaker1: [00:15:32] It's kind of a fortuitous moment that we get to be in conversation in this way together. It was not something that we had initially envisioned. I might follow it, too, by going a little bit deeper into the intersectional ecological approach that you develop in the piece. So one of the things you write early on is that environmental anthropology is a field that has historically organized itself around examining the interrelated sociocultural, physical, economic, chemical, political, geological and biological processes of life on Earth. And then this really raises the question of how this sort of focus on the interrelationship between humans and these spaces that we call environments. How that then coincides with the ideas of intersectionality that have been so generative in many transdisciplinary spaces like cyborgs, right? Gender studies and work coming out of the work of Kimberly Crenshaw and Patricia Hill, Collins and Jordan. So how do you how do we see this sort of fusion or coming together or parallel play, maybe between the interrelated focus of environmental anthropology and the intersectional justice and subjectivity kinds of questions that get raised by intersectionality and intersectional debates?

Speaker5: [00:16:51] I would say that intuitively, for me, why an intersectional approach helps in matters for environmental anthropologists, because that approach is invested not in the body itself, but rather process. And that's the kind of critique I think at least within broader field of anthropology perhaps hasn't been as focused or as tightly articulated in terms of trying to get around questions of power and inequality. So instead of a focus on the body, which of course, is our humanistic approach within anthropology for quite some time, and it's somewhat been ignored through the realm of environmental anthropology, meaning it is actually a critique of the humanist approach and anthropology perhaps hadn't articulated it as such. If you then draw back to this problem of intersectionality and take seriously that these scholars are really deeply interested in process and not bodies, I think that's where the kind of intellectual stimulation and and surprise and nuance gets really played out within environmental anthropology if we take an intersectional approach seriously.

Speaker4: [00:17:58] And I also think that I love the kind of multilayered capacity that this idea holds, that it's about the kinds of things that scholars study and how they study it and what they pay attention to. But then it's also about whose scholarship we're reading, who those people are. You know, what kinds of relationships form their own work and how they articulate that. And it's about, you know, reading intersectionality, interdisciplinary, knowing those are not the same thing, but but it's about so much more. Also in the way we can see it than just about kind of what the research topic or subject is to it's. And I think that's something that really resonates with students, particularly as they're trying to figure out what what do they need to include in their qualifying exams? Like what are they supposed to be reading? How are they supposed to be reading? Who are they supposed to be reading? And so hopefully that of comes through in that text as well.

Speaker1: [00:18:56] I think right now, especially as so many of us are really concerned about climate energy, rapid change in the Anthropocene, the ways that we're thinking about and talking about how to apprehend crisis or address crisis really matter. And so, for example, today there was an article in the New York Times about extinction. And so much of what we receive in mainstream media about extinction really addresses the loss of animal and planetary life, but doesn't in the wake of rapid industrial pollution and other forms of interventions, but doesn't address the fact that in that same moment of displacement, people are also being impacted by that, that those changes that are terraforming the planet are also racialized heavily and have been for a very long time. And one thing that the intersectional approach does is think those historical processes of change together. How can we understand the relations of the planet and the relations of human society as interactive?

Speaker3: [00:20:10] You know, one of the reasons I was so excited to talk with you about this project is, I think it really is a kind of watershed moment in environmental anthropology. I didn't start off my career as an environmental anthropologist. I kind of found my way there halfway along and I'd say even, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, when I first started reading this, I feel as though it was still, you know, a field that was driven in a lot of ways by political ecology, political economy. Nothing wrong with it. But in some ways, it really, I think it was kind of a bit of a conservative field in a lot of a lot of senses. And what's so striking in this amazing period that I think you document so well that just the last decade or so, we've got all of these exciting new voices coming into the field who are really demanding that environmental anthropology takes seriously. Black feminist perspectives take seriously indigenous perspectives to build the kind of intersectional infrastructure for a much greater challenge to the kind of cultural and political status quo, then would be in a sort of, you know, traditional politics of conservation, resource conservation and so forth. So again, I'm not trying to criticize older generations so much as to say, I think we really want to embrace this moment. And I'm curious to hear if any of you want to talk a bit about this, about what it feels like to be to kind of be an environmental anthropologist today where you feel this is going and to what extent in the process of doing the research and the curation fabulous kind of curatorial work you did here, you learn new things about the field. You sort of, in other words, how how transformative was this process for you guys as in your own scholarship, I guess, is what I'm asking.

Speaker4: [00:21:53] It's a great question. I am an environmental anthropologist in an interdisciplinary department, in an anthropology department. So for me, the work feels incredibly necessary to have these cross-cutting conversations. I'm going to go to the Department of Marine Affairs at the University of Rhode Island is a social science, law and policy oriented department. But we work usually very closely with natural scientists with fisheries ecologists, biologists, other kinds of people for coastal management and governance purposes. And for me, you know, I was just incredibly dissatisfied in that in that strange niche where we're doing applied work in New England, you know, probably one of the most fraught spaces historically and contemporarily in the United States, terms of indigenous and, you know, enslaved and, you know, immigration, all of these, all of these compounding processes and that my colleagues were not cognizant of these conversations. They were not cognizant about how these past and these processes, these histories literally built the coastline, as we, you know, come to see it today. So for me, I needed to kind of go out and find the work that could speak to the desperate need of the present. I think to have a much more capacious understanding of what it is we're even talking about when we're talking about the environment, that's where I come from.

Speaker5: [00:23:30] Yeah, I guess my experience coming to thinking of myself as doing environmental anthropology was really from fieldwork and working in a part of the world that had up until very, very recently Coastal Guyana, which is, you know, circum Caribbean. One would argue, but very much still has a presence within American and European anthropology is also being part of Amazonia and understanding that real sort of conceptual divide in terms of how different kinds of places in the world and subregions could be understood as being environmental or not environmental. And so I just got really interested in trying to understand how ethnographic I could chart and make sense of of this coastal landscape and but still being generous and still taking into account what I understand to be area studies and in Caribbean anthropology and also Caribbean studies that had a very particular view of what those environments were. And you know, as Dominique suggested before, it was one that was very much invested for me. At least, it seemed intellectually in questions about political economy and labor and me realizing that while it was in the field, those frameworks wouldn't really answer the questions that I had or make sense of what people were telling me. And so it was from that perspective that I decided and thought, Yeah, there's something here for me to think for in terms of the subfields in environmental anthropology.

Speaker1: [00:24:57] Yeah, I also didn't come to this project, trained as an environmental anthropologist, and I came to that later out of the fieldwork that I did on a concert biodiversity conservation project in Iraq's marshes during the that was launched during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. And it was really a struggle for me at the time because I was seeing this kind of violence on the ground. That was definitely an essential part of the war, but is not classically thought of as war, which is a project to regenerate a wetland that had been historically important. And yet it became an avenue through which several multinational companies interested in water and oil resources could find purchase over the subterranean reserves and and the river ways in Iraq. So I felt like I needed a way to understand and apprehend the sort of generation of life that violence created in Iraq. And for me, the Ecologies framework and particularly recent work that's been coming out of environmental anthropology. And I think even scholars who wouldn't necessarily name themselves in that moment as environmental anthropologists, but who are engaging and thinking about infrastructures and technologies and the relation of agencies was especially helpful in sorting that that through for me. And I think it's really important that the kind of social context in which you are writing this piece to after the the summer of Twenty Twenty and the really global emergence of Black Lives Matter and protests against police violence and repression and a kind of.

Speaker1: [00:26:53] Not that this was something new, but that there was sort of a new set of realizations among many communities across the United States and across the world. And so I think there's something really important about the kind of global political context in which you're doing this writing and that comes across in the text to I think there's a really important point you make here where you say that the themes that you you go through in the piece make visible the ways in which environmental anthropologists commitment to deconstruction, deconstructing nature, culture, dualism is not enough. It's not enough. And this has been a kind of habit not just of environmental anthropology, but anthropology in general. That kind of enlightenment divide that Cartesian dualism between nature culture. Just looking at that and kind of taking out a part is not enough to render visible relations of inequality and life. And the historical present knowledge about the environment is analyzed less as an object and as a social practice informed by violent, colonial colonial histories, cultures of scientific authority and varied social engagements with technologies. This is a really hard hitting point, and I think it's it's a critical point that you're making in the essay. You also you begin the article with this amazing poem that I think it would be great. It's not a long poem, but a powerful and important poem. And Amelia, I think it came to you through a student. Is that right?

Speaker4: [00:28:14] Yeah. I have a wonderful master student who's since graduated named Adrian Cato, and she was giving a presentation in my class race, gender, colonialism and science, and she was giving a presentation on black ecology, this kind of emergent field. So in some ways, I think it's probably been with us for a very long time. And part of her presentation was sharing this poem, and I think it just, you know, the class all kind of sat there for a minute and took it in. It was really strong. And I think her in the acknowledgements in this article for this, but I can go ahead and read it if that it's good, OK, and then you can judge me on that. A small and needful fact is that Eric Garner worked for some time for the Parks and Rec horticultural department, which means perhaps that with his very large hands, perhaps in all likelihood, you put gently into the Earth some plants, which most likely some of them in all likelihood continue to grow, continue to do what such plants do, like houses and feed small and necessary creatures like being pleasant to touch and smell like converting sunlight into food, like making it easier for us to breathe.

Speaker1: [00:29:27] I mean, it's an amazing it's an amazing poem, and I'm really glad that your student located it and brought it into your class and they were able to include it here because I think it really brings together it sort of fuses and futures together such so much of the important work that you're trying to do here. You know, there's some other discussion in the essay about the kind of assumptions about authorship. And I think, Amelia, I think you touched upon this earlier, some of your earlier comments and, you know, thinking about who authors these texts in environmental anthropology, if we think about it in the most capacious ways, like who? Who are the recognized sort of authority figures in that like, you know, maybe it was the political ecologists for a while. Maybe it was the political economists for another moment, but that there's a changing set of dispositions about hearing hearing from different people and different voices and different perspectives. But I wonder, too, if there isn't something about environmental anthropology as a kind of discipline that erases the authors in ways that maybe doesn't happen quite as much in a kind of more traditional sort of people, you know, anthropocentric anthropology where I mean, we've had so many debates in the discipline about reflexivity, and the author herself kind of shows up in the pages of ethnography as interacting with people because she's one human, among others. And I worry sometimes about environmental anthropology being a place that can work in abstractions where the author sort of disappears in the background in a kind of old fashioned objectivist sort of way. Have you found that? Is that? Am I seeing a thread of something that's there or or not? Because it seems like there's a there's a kind of a risk there when we're when we're working with non-human companions to kind of sort of in that kind of classic sort of scientific objective as a way to lift ourselves out of the picture in a way that's not really permissible any longer in the wider field of cultural anthropology with with its anthropocentric orientation.

Speaker5: [00:31:34] So, you know, I wasn't really sure I had never thought about your question before 70. But I think it's an interesting one in the sense that I think there's been a presumption that there's a way about to study environmental anthropology in terms of our theoretical and conceptual frameworks. And that's distinct in. My mind from questions about representation and author and authorship. Of course, they're related, but I think they can be taken up in separate ways, and I think this question about theory and conceptual frameworks specifically is one thing versus what are the questions we want to ask and why and how do we want to ask those questions? So I think there needs to be a lot more work in terms of thinking critically about methods, right? And not in the kind of wonky sense go out in the field. And this is how you collect information like that, of course, is really, really important. But I think there's a lot of work that goes into, you know, as not surprisingly, one of my many mentors, David Scott, thinking about what is a problem space that we're working in and how do we get to that problem space to ask particular kinds of questions? I think that's really important, and I think those questions have been asked what problem and that problem space has been thought about within wider fields of cultural anthropology, but not environmental anthropology as much.

Speaker4: [00:32:48] And the people that who do do that well, I think, are are very explicit about it in their work and writing. So they are intentional. You know, they would say, you know, I come to this from a particular position, but I'm intentionally, you know, I might have had, you know, some of these interests or some of this thinking, but I've been reframing my thoughts or I'm bringing in other work intentionally. I'm asking different kinds of questions intentionally. I'm trying to get at something else. I need to use these other scholars or some of the different material from other places. To get that, I need to talk to the black feminist. I need to go to gender women's studies. I need to bring these questions in. Are these this way of thinking in order to, you know, get to a different part of the conversation? I don't know if that's an incredibly long standing. It's not in the sub field. Environmental anthropology, it isn't. I'm sure that you can find threads, but I think there's a lot of very good recent work. But does that does that where people are explicit and intentional about how they come to these questions and how how they build their frameworks and why?

Speaker1: [00:34:05] Yeah. And I really love what Amelia and there are saying here, because I think what I hear in that conversation is that it's a matter of orientation to the field and what it is. You've been recognized as your epistemological framework. Where does that come from and how are you approaching your own problem space of the field as opposed to reflexivity, which has the tendency to be navel-gazing and directed back toward the researcher? You know, the problem orientation is one that that is your problem as a researcher to make sure that you're thinking within a framework that you're taking intellectual thought emerging from the region that you're working in seriously. And I think that's a different kind of orientation to the problem space of the field.

Speaker3: [00:34:56] So I had a question about erasure and and what one does because I think taking an intersectional turn in environmental anthropology or just kind of environmental studies more broadly is so desperately needed. We know that. And as this turn is being taken, I think one of the things that's being discovered by the field at large because of folks like you who are working on the leading edge of this transformation is that there's been so much suppression of information. There's been so much inattention to critical issues like indigenous violence, like anti-Black violence. And I was reading Cynthia Hartman's Venus piece earlier today for something else, and she's got this great question. She asked that I feel like is a question we ought to be asking ourselves, too. And I thought it might be a way to to bridge the work of this really important review essay in which the three of you are working collaboratively to help again, you know, create a theoretical intervention that can turn this field in the direction it needs to go. But at the same time, we know that you all are as researchers, you know, and ethnographers actively already engaged in these issues elsewhere.

Speaker3: [00:36:10] So maybe this is a way we can. This question from Hartman is maybe a way to bridge sort of from the this article over to your own work. And what she asks is she's writing against the erasures in the the history, the historical archive of transatlantic slavery. In some ways, some things can be recovered and some things can't be recovered. But with the question she asks, which I think is so important is what are the stories one tells in dark times? How can a narrative of defeat enable a place for the living or envision an alternative future? So as you have yourselves individually and collaboratively wrestled with these questions of environmental violence and looking at them anew through an intersectional lens, do you have any thoughts about? Adamant about the stories that need to be told or whether there are ways to sort of take out of this very problematic history, lessons for the future, sort of ways of enabling ourselves to to create a better future.

Speaker5: [00:37:05] You know, my gut response is is to say that we can speculate about what those stories are right? And I say that in the sense of we don't know always what the stories, what the stories will be just because it's dark times. And so to take seriously, right, that the story might not start with the lynching. That story might not start with whether it's with your knee or with an actual lynch, but rather it might start with what came after. It might start with this idea that there is a kind of optimism or kind of uncertainty that can't be directly traced back to the past. While we still take seriously that past, so trying to nuance the ways in which we tell the unfolding of history, I think is part of the story that we need to tell and that most importantly, our informants have been doing that for quite some time. And to really push back the way to push back against that disinformation and misinformation is to let those stories be known. Right. So it's not saying, Oh, I have all the facts about all the lynchings since twenty twenty, right? But instead, I have all these stories like Anita and small and a small beautiful. Yeah, thank you. Small and needful facts, right? That's the story that's already being told. That's telling us about in history that has a different kind of need, an edge and unfolding that can't necessarily be told through our given traditions of what it means to know a slave past, for example, or to know that Middle Passage,

Speaker4: [00:38:32] There's just so much. It's there. It's so appropriate to say, you know, this is what this is, the world that are the people that we work with, people who were collaborate with and. This is the world that they live in. They don't live in a world that has been prescribed by death and genocide. They live in a world that is very much about making a future in which they have an important space and meaning in that in that future, at least in the work that I think maybe all of us are doing now in some shape or form like that, there's a very future oriented project in a lot of ways, and that's incredibly important. And it's about it's about creating new possibilities and not being limited without being ignorant of events. But exactly what Sarah is saying, growing out of them into something else.

Speaker1: [00:39:26] And I think that each of us really takes seriously our work to share stories from the people that we work with. I mean, especially, I don't know. I think about this a lot because so much of Iraq has been overdetermined and so few story narratives of people who are living in Iraq have come through. And there's a there's a groundswell now of scholars who are doing that work, and I think it's amazing and incredible and I'm so pleased to see that work emerging. But I also think that our work does look toward the future and is in conversation with the past. It's a historically grounded future, one that we are continually striving to push forward.

Speaker5: [00:40:12] If it came to mind as Bridget was finishing, was that and most importantly, write that and it's so obvious. But I think it often needs to be said that there's more than one way to tell that past. Right? And that's part of the second order questions that come through the story that we're telling right there that the stories for the sake of staying there again, statistics for the census. The point is the stories are offering other ways to think about the questions we want to ask and to theorize what that past is, right? So there are, of course, multiple ways to tell that past. But I often think that's forgotten when doing ethnography right, especially in places where it's a war zone, right? Or it's a plantation, you know, whatever the quote space should be or ought to be.

Speaker1: [00:40:55] Well, thinking about those kind of those kind of temporal interweaving to the history and how it gets told and what stories get iterated and reiterated and and how it folds into the futures that that people are shaping to be bright and positive and productive and generationally, you know, forward looking. I wanted to ask about your own projects now that you're working on and how they they kind of coincide with what you've been doing in the recent past, how it's building out of your, your past work, your contemporary work and into these these next projects and big research work that you're doing now in this space. So Amelia, do you want to start us off? I think you were the first one to mention the future words, so.

Speaker4: [00:41:40] Well, one project that I've been involved in is about, I suppose it's about regenerating the path of a particular place called Block Island, which is off the shore of Rhode Island, about 12 miles, maybe out into the ocean. And it is a vacation destination, a recreational island. It is kind of lesser known than Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket, but but likes to be publicly thought of along the same lines without advertises itself. And I was doing research there a few years ago on the America's first offshore wind farm, which was built right offshore of Block Island, the Block Island wind farm. Five turbines. And that brought me out to the island, often riding the prairie often. And I was really struck by the absence of any visible sign of reckoning with the past. There was, you know, a celebration of settler narratives of founding families arriving from Massachusetts Bay Colony and 16 61. That's a prevalent date on that island for that reason. There's a hotel called Sixteen Sixty One, amongst many other things, and there were some, you know, indigenous place names around. But there was not a lot of context behind them. And there was archaeology displayed in the Black Island Historical Society Museum from the deep past. You know what people are calling paleo history, I suppose. That's a really deep pass. So there's examples of that. But but but that history ended. And then there was a little photograph like like taped into a case of a man maybe from, you know, the 90s, the early 2000s, it was hard to tell it wasn't even really labeled.

Speaker4: [00:43:30] And that got me thinking like, Well, there's there's there's a history here. There's a past, there's a story that isn't getting attention that isn't being narrated either intentionally or not. And so that my current so that work on the wind farm brought me into this question about, you know, who lived on the island and who still lives on the island that that don't, you know, who doesn't participate in these settler narratives. And so people who are currently negotiating, I think, is the best way to put it, negotiating for an indigenous identity or to be recognized as indigenous and also negotiating their identity as a black and indigenous people. It's a family. And so my very small part in in their story is just trying to help network help the family network with scholars around the region to help kind of bring out exactly what Sarah was saying about how we narrate the past to kind of bring out different kinds of stories about their family history generationally in ways that show how their amazing strength and capacity to hold on to land and to hold on, to hold on to claims, to space and to belonging in this place that is so very it has otherwise, for all intents and purposes, forgotten. And so I think, you know, one of the one of the products of this work will be an exhibit that does some of this public facing work. And it's my first foray into something that is not entirely text based and locked away in journal articles or manuscripts.

Speaker1: [00:45:15] That sounds super cool. Emilia, I want to go, I want to go see it in real life so it can actually be there. Bridget, do you want to tell us a bit about some of the emerging work that you're into now? Sure, absolutely. Yeah. So I had this question at the end of wrapping up the draft of my book. What is the geological impact of racialized violence that was sort of lingering there? It wasn't a question that I got to in the manuscript. And at the same time, I I had never anticipated at all doing this, but my great grandfather became very compelling to me. So I went to Sicily with my family on this family trip begrudgingly. And I was shocked by how familiar, how much like Jordan, it felt when I was there. And I wanted to do this project about my great grandfather's journey from sulfur mines in Sicily to the limestone quarries of desert Tunisia and then to Tunis and and then onward to New York, where he worked for the MTA. And I really looking at cultures of energy here, actually in how mining produced particular mobilities across the Mediterranean and that were instrumental to making the region of the Mediterranean and looking at that at that process in dialectical relation with migrants from Tunis today who are boarding boats and and are immobilized in the seas by the immigration policies of Fortress Europe. So I'm excited to take on that project. And you asked earlier how the intersectional work that we've done collaboratively influenced us individually, and I absolutely think that this is a project that I would not necessarily have seen or taken on in the same way if I hadn't been in conversation with Amelia and Sarah. So I'm really grateful to that partnership. Sarah?

Speaker5: [00:47:27] Sure. Yeah. So I think my project, my project, as I was finishing up my my first book project, which was situated around coastal Guyana and climate adaptation efforts, one of the things that was so stark and obvious at the same time to be around some of those state oriented projects is the fact that, you know, experts as well as, you know, ordinary folk would just simply say, we want more data. We can't do these projects without any data to build a bigger dam, build a more efficient canal, what have you? And so there's a sense that everyone wanted. Everyone wanted data. They weren't really sure where to get it. And more importantly, you sort of needed proof of concept for a lot of these projects, right? The U.N. or World Bank would come in and say, If you don't have the data, we don't care, we're not going to fund you. And so one of the things that was really interesting to me was that, you know, a lot of these consulting networks, they would say, Well, you know, the people who are finding all this data and making sure it happens are insurance firms. And so I just got really interested in what is this larger network of information and knowledge and expertise that's upholding this economy. I can't think of a better word assemblage. I don't know for climate adaptation. And so I'm really interested in tracking how this data is made possible in the first place, as well as it gets used by different groups. And so, you know, Bermuda happens to be sort of the World Center, as they say, they brand themselves as a climate risk capital of the world. So I'm interested in really trying to get a sense of how does insurance create place? How does insurance reconstitute natural and built environments? What are the kinds of, you know, labor and the kinds of peoples that make it happen? And so in Bermuda, if you talk to most people.

Speaker5: [00:49:21] And it's so cool. I think it's really awesome in the sense of everyone will say I have some relation to the insurance industry and I'm really excited about it. Yeah. Who would ever thought you would think that right, unless you come from an insurance family? And so I just think that's awesome and really and really interesting to think through in the sense of we've had a lot of critiques in anthropology in terms of say, like the post-industrial like economy or post-industrial society. But you have this space in Bermuda where you have all these people who are not just banking on. Yes, sure. Catastrophe and the like superficial sense, but also are deeply invested in saying there is a particular technique where there is a particular practice that can make climate change meaningful to people across the world. Even if we live in this space, that's quite vulnerable. So the second project for me is kind of an extension of the first one in the sense of, I want to understand globally. How and why climate adaptation makes sense to people and at other times might fade into the background into other kinds of projects and technologies because it's not always obvious that in the case of Bermudian insurance firms and what have you, but they're always going to care about climate change as a kind of product or or for developing markets. So that's where I'm right now with thinking about new projects.

Speaker1: [00:50:38] Super interesting. I love that question. How does insurance make place or how does sort of the insurance industry create these places for itself in many ways, but in response to these bigger crises? Ok, I think my co-host Dominic Boyer has a final question for us. That would be

Speaker3: [00:50:55] Me as I'm floating in with the closer which I'm hoping to, to tie it all back up with a bow as US podcasters try to do, bringing us back to where we started. I was just interested to hear whether any of you had any thoughts you wanted to share just about the importance of collaboration as scholars, as people working in hard times, in a number of different ways pandemics, climate emergency, all of it. Is this something you would want to do again? I mean, is collaboration going to become part of your practice? Has it already been part and would you recommend it to to the young folks who are listening to this podcast?

Speaker5: [00:51:32] Yeah, I mean, I have done other collaborative projects of recent. I would I would say it was very weird. All of them sort of happened at once, and I would say I did rule of thumb, whatever, if I could be. So to the point, I think collaboration happens because people like learn how to trust and work together. I mean, that might seem really obvious, but it's not just because we have a similar topic of interest, right? It's because we've learned through the process of trusting each other in terms of working with different theories, different literatures, whatever. So I think that's the most exciting thing about doing collaborations. It's like learning how to build different kinds of relationships with people.

Speaker1: [00:52:13] I personally love working collaboratively. I think the sort of model of working in your own ethnographic silo is really difficult and limiting for me. I like to be in conversation with other people and that's how I am most alive in my work. And so I also have other collaborative projects that are ongoing that, like Sarah, happened around the same time. Maybe because I'm more open to it, maybe because I see that there are more collaborative projects in anthropology now than there ever seemed to have been. And so it really seems like there's more permission to do that kind of work than there has been in the past. And it's great work. It's amazing the kind of work that's coming out in a diversity of formats, from short essays to art exhibits to films to conferencing together using Twitter and the and the and Zoom. It's just, I think it's a really thrilling part of my practice now.

Speaker4: [00:53:14] I think I said to my dean the other day that I'm not doing any work that isn't collaborative anymore. So, you know, learn how to count that for promotion. That's great. I think I was probably nicer than that or, you know, more humble than that. But but I think this last year and almost to this COVID time, however, you know, this amorphous COVID time it it has. I've started collaborations prior to to that, but it's so necessary now just having connection like connection that Bridget and Sara provide. It's not only a space of creativity. I mean, when we start collaboratively writing things together like we might not even speak, we're just all like in the Google Doc, fiddling around like changing, like just riffing off each other in ways that are incredibly fulfilling. And I'm also working with another woman on a film project. And that is just true that my institution, she's become a very close friend through that process, and it's incredibly important. I mean, it's it's it gets you through the day because not only are you working on something that's meaningful and relevant, but you're doing it with people who you grow to care about. And I think that that that is something that my work at least missed, you know, doing kind of your lonely doctoral work, especially in anthropology. We like to be lonely, but it's not necessary to do good work. And I think thinking about the relationships you can build through collaboration that might feed you in so many ways and then make the work better makes the work better, too. I think it's just so important and essential, especially now

Speaker3: [00:54:56] That's that's very much how we feel about it to me, as you can guess. Anyway, our thanks to all of you for joining us. This has been a wonderful conversation. I want to just give you guys a chance to quickly plug your books or other things that you might have published or put out there in the world that you love for people to take a look at. We'll also put links to your websites into the show notes. But can we do a lightning round so so you guys can plug your stuff?

Speaker5: [00:55:20] Sure, I'll go first. I have my first book manuscript coming out engineering vulnerability with Duke Press in April 20. Twenty two worlds away, but that means you can get prepared.

Speaker2: [00:55:31] That's a pre-order that book everyone, please pre-order.

Speaker5: [00:55:35] So that's the major thing I'm happy to plug.

Speaker1: [00:55:38] I have a book I'm working on now. It'll still be a while before it's out. It's in draft form called Ecology of War, Iraq's marshes on the battle grounds of war, and another project that is in development and an essay series with Alina Kim. It's called War Zone Ecology Iraq's Marshes on the Battlegrounds of War, and we did that as a collaboration with 16 or 17 other scholars and really excited to see that work come out.

Speaker3: [00:56:07] Wonderful. Thanks. And Amelia,

Speaker4: [00:56:10] Well, I'm still enjoying the fact that anybody might read my book that came out in 2019 destination Anthropocene thanks to tourism in the Bahamas. But most of the time, I don't think about that at all. I do think of the Bahamas all the time. Sorry, Bahamas. I do think about you all the time, but I'm, you know, the project, I think, are the exhibit that I mentioned is tentatively going to be titled Public Memory Space and Belonging Manichaean history on Block Island. But that's the working title. And then another film project will probably be coming out in the next year, hopefully also working title, which is decolonising science question mark. It's not going to be the title. I'm not going to have decolonizing in the title, but it's going to have a title that comes from the content in some way. We just haven't found it yet and as we're editing, but look out for that too. If you're in STEM fields and Simone and I and Jeff actually have a book, please plug that too. Yeah, we let's plug it. But somebody, you're going to have to remind me of what our title is because I keep. Wanting to call it elemental polarities. That's not what it is, is it?

Speaker1: [00:57:16] Well, OK, we have we haven't quite figured out the subtitle, but the title is definitely called similarities. So if people look for similarities and I don't know, what do you think like nine months from now, I'm just sort of guessing. But let's be real, it's OK. Let's be realistic. Six to nine months from now. But the great thing is it's going to be open access and so free to the world to download. Coming out with Punkt books, which is a very cool, open access press, and we've got a lot of great authors and voices in there. It's a really, I think, a really interesting collection and it's been great to collaborate with you and Jeff on it.

Speaker4: [00:57:55] Project Yeah. Needless to say, that's a collaborative project. The film is a collaborative project. The exhibit is a collaborative project only collaborations from here on out. I love

Speaker3: [00:58:03] That. I love that. That's that's what that's that's our logline for the episode. Thank you again. It's been so wonderful to spend this time with you and to learn more about your work and to talk about this terrific essay that you wrote together. Anything else since before we sort of

Speaker1: [00:58:20] Know just also thinks it was a fantastic to be able to talk with the three of you together. So thank you for making the time. Thank you guys so much. I really appreciate it, and it's been a wonderful time to talk to you today.

Speaker5: [00:58:32] Yeah, thanks.