coe177_energy-justice.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Hey, welcome back, everyone, to the culture's energy podcast, this is episode one hundred and seventy seven.

Speaker2: [00:00:29] Wow, that seems like that's a journey that's a big no and a happy no. It's been a journey, a journey inside a voyage.

Speaker1: [00:00:36] Yeah, inside an adventure

Speaker2: [00:00:38] And an adventure.

Speaker1: [00:00:39] So many. How are you doing today, Simone?

Speaker2: [00:00:41] How you thought that was funny?

Speaker1: [00:00:43] I never making that joke. I'm going to tell you how it is a word people use a lot. It's also, Oh

Speaker2: [00:00:48] My god, I know

Speaker1: [00:00:50] You had a chance to change your last name. Probably more than one. Oh God, but you fought back against the patriarchy.

Speaker2: [00:00:55] So I

Speaker1: [00:00:55] Stuck with that

Speaker2: [00:00:56] With my dad's name. Exactly big fights. I'm stuck with the patronymic of my father and his father before him and his father before him. But yeah,

Speaker1: [00:01:05] Back to the bog people of

Speaker2: [00:01:06] Ireland other than self-declare other than suffering through the patriarchy. I'm doing OK. Yeah, well, actually, I'm not. I'm in terrible pain because I have a terrible back, but I'm hoping that by next week I won't be saying that.

Speaker1: [00:01:20] Yeah, you have been suffering this week and it's no joke and I feel badly for you. And it's even worse that somehow this seems to be connected to your academic life.

Speaker2: [00:01:29] Oh, it's very especially my academic.

Speaker1: [00:01:31] The trackpad? Yeah. Drives your back

Speaker2: [00:01:32] Crazy. Yes. Yeah, it's happened. This happens every time I'm working kind of crazily on a big project. Yeah, it's definitely happened sort of continuously with the first book it. It was going on for a very long time with the second book, Remember? Yeah. And this is like, I point to this muscle spasm and I say NSFW proposal. Yeah, because that's what it is. It's like doing too much mousing and cutting and also going online and pointing on things and all the kind of fine motor stuff that we do with our dominant hand is not good on the trackpad.

Speaker1: [00:02:04] Yeah, there you go. So anyhow, so anyway, we're sending we're sending out thoughts and prayers as we do to your back for the week to come. So there's a bit of annoying news that I wanted to share. I just felt like somebody has to flag this. And since we have a podcast, why not flag what we heard from our dear friend? I guess I won't name him because I don't want him to get in any trouble. But but a dear friend who works for a university

Speaker2: [00:02:29] In a major university, a research center in Mexico? Yes, that

Speaker1: [00:02:33] Apparently a document was sent to, I think, not only his university, but to maybe all of the public universities in Mexico explaining that because I think the exact quote is it's not just for there to be a rich government of a poor people, right, that they should expect their budgets slashed anywhere between 30 to 50 percent. And it's quite detailed as to what's thirty and what's 50 percent like.

Speaker2: [00:02:56] No travel medication supplies. I mean, it goes through. It's a whole detailed list of what will be cut by what amount, but it's really significant.

Speaker1: [00:03:04] But just imagine that imagine imagine you're already and believe me, Mexican academia does not live on the high horse. In my experience, so you're cutting what's already probably a pretty lean operating budget, down 30 to 50 percent. And and here's the kicker

Speaker2: [00:03:21] Oh, are you going to? Are you going to spoil it?

Speaker1: [00:03:23] Well, I want you to do it, but I'm just saying I'm just going to say it goes through this whole thing, this kind of righteous justification for these cuts and then gets to the last paragraph in which it says, what? I'm asking, Simone, how is our more talented Spanish speaker here to translate?

Speaker2: [00:03:37] Do you want me to read that last line and then translate it quickly, please? All right. First, it sounds like according to these, the law and responsibilities and the federal law of austerity, the Estado, the the executive has the the ability to reassign the resources that are generated because of the cuts, the savings that are obtained because of the present measures that are happening and where. And then it says poor motivo. Either Ecuador, nuestras prioridad is Amos decidedto destiny or todo lo Dorado called essas medidas are incremented los beneficios fiscales adicionales cay, say Utah guard Pemex corn or el objeto, the fertilizer esta grande empresa estratégia de la Nacional. So in case you, I think probably people got that, but all the additional savings and resources that are saved from cutting university budgets are going to Pemex and only Pemex, the with the objective to reinforce this great strategic business and organization of the nation.

Speaker1: [00:04:46] All right. And it's signed the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador. I've got to say a middle finger to you on that is some bullshit right there. So for those of you who are not clued into what Pemex is, it's Mexico's giant parastatal oil

Speaker2: [00:05:02] Petroleum para nationalized. Yeah, but there's been energy reform so that it's actually become more privatized in the last several years. And so this is particularly disturbing.

Speaker1: [00:05:13] Ok, there's there's well, there's a lot to say about it, but the first thing I want to say and I think this is the big point is any because AMLO ran as a kind of left. List outside the box, I

Speaker2: [00:05:23] Think everyone knows that

Speaker1: [00:05:24] Kind of, I guess you could say, is kind of a sturdy sample

Speaker2: [00:05:27] Of Mexico that do like a workers man,

Speaker1: [00:05:30] But any kind of left populism that reinforces petro nationalism is bullshit. It's absolute bullshit. Sorry, the beginning and end. That's all I would say about that. I'm really furious about this. Yeah. In fact, when I first read it, I thought it was a joke. I thought, Oh, this is some, some satire. Some other and academic has cooked up to be funny. Give some shit to his colleagues and write. But I think it's real, and I think it's pretty frightening. Reality.

Speaker2: [00:05:56] So this is something that like this is something that Latin American scholars and others have written about. So there's extreme activism. Yes, right? I'm thinking of glutinous is one of the big people who writes about extra activism, but they also do write about neo extra activism, which is in the name of the nation. So there's just plain old extreme activism where you have North American European companies coming and taking the riches of oil and minerals and gems and gold and whatever. And then you have neo activism, which is taking those resources and sort of reinvesting them in the nation state, but still perpetrating the crimes of extreme activism. Because it turns out that, you know, even if a bunch of the Pemex money is going to the Mexican nation, it is also still destructive in its practice. Or, you know, if you think about like tin mining or something like it may be going back to the Bolivian nation, but it's still destructive extractive process, even if it's meant for the people.

Speaker1: [00:06:57] Yeah, if you've seen the climate change productions and the drought projections for Mexico, they are devastating. Mexico will be a much. It's already the country that has the highest per capita consumption of bottled water, and there are more droughts looming with warming and more severe droughts. And so the idea that, you know, reinforcing your petroleum production is doing anything for the long term health, welfare survivability of your country is insane. And so I just wanted to call that out and say, and then there's the kind of insult to injury taking this money out of the backs of the educated middle classes and giving it to Pemex. And the back story here is for folks who don't know that Pemex has never really been able to develop its offshore production capacities, in part because the government has essentially used Pemex as a bank and has extracted massive taxes from the company. So whereas you know your traditional oil majors would take all of the billions and trillions of dollars that they make and reinvest that in exploration and new technology, Pemex has just been signing a big check over to the Mexican government. And as President Felipe Calderon told us

Speaker2: [00:08:01] Putatively to the nation

Speaker1: [00:08:02] Right to our faces, he told us to our faces, it's accounted for up to forty three percent of the annual budget. So all AMLO is trying to do here is to try to boost, you know, Pemex as revenue so that he has more money to do. God knows what give it back to the universities. Maybe? I don't know. But you took it from them in the first place. So anyway. Rant over in solidarity with our Mexican academic friends, though.

Speaker2: [00:08:25] Yeah. Bad move. Amlo just maintained.

Speaker1: [00:08:27] Yeah, really bad. And it makes you worry about these other populists elsewhere, too. Anyway, so but in happier news, we have a special shout out today. We've got a shout out to a birthday girl that's with Three R's, a recent Melbourne University graduate. Her name is Ali Schultz. Happy birthday, Ali.

Speaker2: [00:08:47] Happy birthday, Aly

Speaker1: [00:08:48] Aly is working on a super cool project that is called Sky Farm Simone. Do you want to hear about what Sky Farm is?

Speaker2: [00:08:55] Totally. And then I might have a reference for Aly, too. I want to know about Elise Nana's interesting name.

Speaker1: [00:09:01] It is cool. So Sky Farm is a project that she is, I think, actually project managing. So that's awesome work you're doing, Ali that is putting a farm on top of a two thousand square metre carpark rooftop located opposite the Melbourne Convention Centre. And apparently, it's going to grow up to five tonnes of food a year, which I think is pretty amazing. Plus, it's got, you know, the usual kind of anti heat island effects of absorbing that sunlight and putting it into plants instead of into concrete and all that good stuff. So this is really cool.

Speaker2: [00:09:32] And so when we go to Australia, yes, which is burning up a bunch of jet fuel to get there, we can have like a yummy carrot from atop the sky farm. Yeah, that'd be nice.

Speaker1: [00:09:40] That would be awesome. So I say right up your alley, if you'd save us a

Speaker2: [00:09:43] Trip

Speaker1: [00:09:44] And invite us to your sky farm, we would love to visit it. If it's a

Speaker2: [00:09:48] Basil leaf, maybe I don't

Speaker1: [00:09:49] Know. Also, I think we should thank Artichoke. Her friend Will, for letting us know about her birthday. And it's not clear whether there's a loving relationship between Will and Islay, but I think there is OK. And I, as I said, I've said this more than once. I think the kind of love that the Cultures of Energy podcast can help to create and reinforces the best kind of love. So. So shout out to both of you.

Speaker2: [00:10:12] Excellent. So what was

Speaker1: [00:10:14] Your do you have another Islay point or do you wanna sing? You could sing.

Speaker2: [00:10:17] No, no. I already read aloud them. I already read aloud. In Spanish and sound like a big dog, so I'm not going to sing, but I'm curious about Italy's name, but she's not actually here, so we can't really hear back from her, so we can only speculate, but

Speaker1: [00:10:30] There is something called Twitter.

Speaker2: [00:10:32] I think the sky farm is super cool, and I was going to point to an essay that we published in Cultural Anthropology. It's probably been about four or five years now by the famous professor of climate named Mike Hulme. Yes, HLM. And it's called. The essay is called Cultivating the Sky. And he kind of he's not talking about parking lots, exactly, but kind of speculative. It's sort of a riff on potential geoengineering and the way in which this guy could become a sort of harvestable space beyond Terra. It's very it's speculative and interesting and and kind of theoretical, very theoretical, I guess, but it might be interesting to Islay and others who are doing sky stuff.

Speaker1: [00:11:13] Yes, absolutely. Anyway, we do want to see that sky farm. So that's going to be awesome. Yeah, that's super cool. Now, you know who would love to visit that sky farm would be not one, but six guests we have on this week's podcast. Last week, we were at the Recentering Energy Justice Symposium at UC Santa Barbara. They very kindly invited us out to talk about this very podcast, as well as some of the other media activities we've engaged in over the past few years. And then we had a great chance to sit down with the two coaches on that project, Xaviera Brandon and Mona Ademiluyi, and also with their colleagues Stefan Myesha, David Pellow, Emily Role and Janet Walker to talk about this and Sawyer seminar, which is called Energy, Justice and Global Perspective. Yeah, right?

Speaker2: [00:11:59] Yes, we are calling it recentering energy justice.

Speaker1: [00:12:01] Well, that's the name of the event. But yeah, but that's yeah, the whole know sort of seminar is called energy, justice and global perspective, right? And so we're talking about kind of all of the different cool things that we're doing in that project and how it, among other things, led them to connect much more closely to the indigenous Chumash communities. That's all ancestral to much.

Speaker2: [00:12:20] Oh yeah, we had a really cool welcome.

Speaker1: [00:12:22] Yeah, that was amazing.

Speaker2: [00:12:23] These two Chumash women, that was really amazing.

Speaker1: [00:12:25] Yeah, but really, you know what we spend a lot of time talking about was the need to look to the global south and indigenous communities for guidance in terms of thinking through what energy justice is, especially as we're, you know, thinking through the challenges of thinking about justice across time and across cultures. And we talk a lot also in the conversation with them about collaboration and the roles that scholar activism and pedagogy can play in terms of helping to form what the keynote speaker in front of the pod, Kyle Power's White, talked about as true consent relationships, which will be necessary for any kind of movement away from our Anthropocene, right?

Speaker2: [00:13:06] I'll also direct people back to the great pod conversation we had with Kyle post-White earlier, where we go into some more detail about consent and the concept of consent. It was super interesting.

Speaker1: [00:13:17] So it was it was a really, really good event, and I'm glad we had a chance to process it a bit with the organizers. So that was fun. So what else do we have to talk about? We've done birthday wishes. We have given a big scolding scolding to the president of Mexico. Yeah, and a big shout out to our colleagues working on Energy Justice at UCSB. Simone, what else is there to talk about today?

Speaker2: [00:13:42] Well, I don't know. That seems like a lot. I don't know. I don't want to, you know, overwhelm the front end of the pod with too much water stuff down to save stuff for tomorrow. Oh, I know I was remembering that one of the questions that got asked at the event was now are, I don't know, maybe you just brought it up, but somehow you mentioned that you sometimes lay down during the podcast. I'm sitting up, right? So right now. So I decided in honor of that statement that you made and because of my aching back, I'm now laying down in the podcast and I even had my feet up.

Speaker1: [00:14:14] Listeners, if you would just take a moment to burn a candle for some of these back in the week to come, I'm serious. We can use all the help we can. You can't hurt. It's a struggle over here, obviously, so

Speaker2: [00:14:24] It doesn't like the chemo sphere of my icy heart. It smells like a nursing home. It's like Bengay. It's not Bengay. It's called icy hot, but it's that same menthol smell and it's pretty.

Speaker1: [00:14:34] We've got this pretty nasty. You got this like industrial strength.

Speaker2: [00:14:39] And yet it's not

Speaker1: [00:14:40] Really

Speaker2: [00:14:41] Fixing. It's not really fixing it, but it smells like, hell, yes.

Speaker1: [00:14:44] Yeah, it's pretty intense. That's the thing is when you walk into the waft of it, the chemo trail of that icy hot, actually, just like it kind of made me completely disoriented. Like, Where am I, what's going on?

Speaker2: [00:14:57] But it does clear out your passages. It's, you know,

Speaker1: [00:15:00] Yeah, it was good. It's good for clearing your head. I just don't think it's doing anything for your bag.

Speaker2: [00:15:04] No, not enough. Anyhow, OK?

Speaker1: [00:15:06] Until next week, another exciting episode on the horizon, folks. Until then, we will say,

Speaker2: [00:15:11] Oh my gosh, should we say everyone's name? Ok, let me show we have to do. No. So we've got go Janet. Go David, go Stephane. Girl, Mona, go Xaviera and go Emily and go and go. Ok, excellent, good. Welcome back, cultures of energy, listeners, we are here at the beautiful campus of UC Santa Barbara and there are eight smiling faces sitting around the microphone right now. And what you can't tell, but you might know if you are here is that we've just finished a little post symposium dance that was orchestrated by David Pellow and his favorite reggae band, which is what? Chronic electronics? So we've been dancing. And now we're ready to get down and do some talking, too.

Speaker1: [00:16:17] So we've got the two of your two co-hosts here and we have six other guests. So this is breaking all barriers of the theoretical limit of guests on our guests. We are now up to six at one time. I am just going to read their names very quickly. And then as we get into it, I'm going to ask everyone to just identify themselves quickly as they speak for the first time. And, you know, choose some kind of outrageous accent, maybe that you then have to need other things to do if somebody wants to do a Boris bad enough voice, for example, or something like that. So Javier Baradaran, Mona W.G., Stefan Yesr, David Pellow, Emily Rolle and Janet Walker are with us. Welcome all of you. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm going to let Simone how to get there.

Speaker2: [00:17:01] The symposium that we've just this is just one piece of an ongoing melon sawyer seminar that you all have organized and put a lot of effort and time and energy into and justice and justice. And the theme of the series of events and discussions is energy justice. And so we wanted to begin by asking you why that is an important category or set of thematics to address and think about and think through in today's context.

Speaker3: [00:17:30] This is Mona. I'll sort of begin with the origin story of this, this melon, which really began long before I ever started my job on this campus. I think the work that all of my colleagues here have been doing for a long time have kind of led to the synergy that's that's sort of ultimately produce this concept of energy, justice and global perspective as being really a theme that we felt could carry a sawyer seminar across an entire year and well beyond. Now what we're all aware, and essentially so I'm in film and media studies in the Humanities and Fine Arts Division at UCSB, and my colleague and friend Xaviera, who is in global studies and social sciences, approached me with this idea that even though we're both junior faculty and it would be totally insane to do this at the time, she's since

Speaker4: [00:18:23] Moved on, blown up,

Speaker3: [00:18:26] Blown up. You know that could there be a way that we could pull this off because we were both so invested and sort of critical approaches coming from within the humanities and the social sciences to really kind of elevating conversation that was happening not just on our campus, but just everywhere and sort of building on the work that you all have been doing at Rice and many others across across the country in different kinds of interdisciplinary energy studies, programs and centers to do something at UC Santa Barbara that could really bring together the work that people are doing beyond the hard sciences, which is really been sort of championed as the focus here regionally. And there is incredible, important work being done within the energy, environmental studies spaces on campus. But we feel that there's so much to be added by adding a perspective that is necessarily fundamentally, first and foremost, looking to the global south and to indigenous communities worldwide as the basis for understanding energy, justice. And so drawing on not only our work but kind of pulling together graduate students and all the regional and international national expertise that we've been able to bring to campus through the very generous programming budget of the Mellon Sawyer seminar. So that's kind of where it started with Javier coming to me and saying, how could we make this happen and then do want to talk a little bit about where we went from there?

Speaker4: [00:19:52] Yeah. So this is Javier. And to add to what Mona was saying, you know, the goal is really to recenter voices that are normally left out of these energy, justice or energy policy conversations. The Indigenous perspectives, global south perspectives that bring a lot of complexity to questions of energy justice because it's not just about production, but also consumption, as we've been hearing a lot today on problems of access around the world. And we felt that Santa Barbara, though, was was was a crucial place from which to be thinking about these things. So I'm in a global studies department. We all of us work in very global ways, think about the global in different ways, and we wanted to continue those conversations, but also think about the ways in which the global is made locally. And so Santa Barbara is as a community, as an area, has a. Long history of oil production. Still, today it is the fourth largest producer of oil, I think in California and California is still the fourth largest producer of oil in the United States, which today, of course, is the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas. So we still occupy a really important place in the global oil and fossil fuel economy, as producers and as consumers. Even as California sort of sees itself as being really on the progressive forefront of of zero emission policies and things like that. So we wanted to to connect these long histories of place. And I did that initially in the fall through these field guides and having our students look at oil production sites along our coastline. And that's has generated lots of activities throughout the year that I'll let other people speak more about. So, yeah, making connections across all these different scopes. I mean, does

Speaker2: [00:21:41] Someone want to say something about the importance of Santa Barbara sort of history of offshore oil spill and how that animated environmental justice, too? Because it seems to me that's a critical piece of the story here in this particular place.

Speaker4: [00:21:55] Absolutely. We we kind of got lucky that it happened to be the 50 year anniversary of oil spill, which is one of our guest speakers said. I can't remember now who actually maybe Teresa special or maybe someone else that they prefer not to talk about the Santa Barbara oil spill because Santa Barbara didn't spill the oil, but the union oil spill that happened in Santa Barbara. So we spent quite a lot of time in the earlier parts during the fall and the winter talking about the spill, its causes, its legacy reactions at the time. And it was a really wonderful way to start because from the very first seminar meeting, Mona took us all to the special collections here at UCSB Library and our graduate students. The first thing they noticed there were like, There's a lot of narratives. There's a lot of faces missing from these archives. The faces, for example, of black, incarcerated people who were brought to the beaches to do part of the cleanup. The voices of local Chumash tribes who who have engaged with oil in their area in lots of ways throughout throughout time. And so it highlighted part of the purpose, really of what had motivated us to to do this seminar at this time.

Speaker3: [00:23:13] And I just want to jump in to kind of finish the story of of how this group as a whole came together because I think it's actually quite important sort of in terms of thinking about what kind of team we could actually bring together, who would be invested and who would really all take on the work because of of of deep engagements and personal commitments to to these broader sort of themes that we were getting at, which was developed really in obviously in conversation with with everyone here. And so we ended up selecting three incredible people to approach and have been so lucky to benefit from their long careers of of really engaging at many different levels with questions of justice. And so I also when I sort of turned to you three to also help evolve this conversation.

Speaker2: [00:24:04] Well, we were thinking, I mean, you had an incredible number of events and people speaking and conversations, but we were thinking it might be good to kind of think through a takeaway lesson or a key word or a thematic that stands out to you in particular as something that you will forever cherish coming out of this experience.

Speaker1: [00:24:24] What did you learn?

Speaker2: [00:24:24] What did you learn, Janet? Do you want to start us off?

Speaker4: [00:24:27] Well, that is a challenging question. Just say yes if I have to start off here. Well, I would say that there is no one take take away. First of all, that would be an impossibility, as you well know in asking that provocative question. So thank you very much. I guess when I was invited by Mona and Javier to join, I was deeply honored and I was hoping that I could do something, but I in conjunction with everyone. But I had a track record of having mounted other programs collaboratively over a certain amount of time on this campus, and I don't know if that was one of the things that that you thought would be useful about my presence here. But back in in

Speaker3: [00:25:12] What's that among the many things?

Speaker4: [00:25:14] Well, back in 2012 2013, some of us, along with Annalise Llewellyn and John Forn, among other people, had convened a critical issues in America, which is offered by our campus as a as a theme each year on figuring sea level rise. And we had worked with scientists and it ended up being pretty provocative and we were able to bring an oceanographer of the Navy who was without portfolio. He had stepped down Admiral. Totally retired Rear Admiral Titley, but then at that time, we also invited some of the members of the local shoe community, and that was where I first met Roberta Cordero and Mia Lopez. And so I began to realize that significance. And then two years ago, some of us I collaborated with others once again brought eight of the water protectors from Standing Rock. And of course, we we certainly could not have done it without consulting Inez Taliban, who's a Native American faculty member and has been for 40 years or or more, possibly more than 40 years, and again, Mia Lopez. So I knew that we were creating this productive relationship with with local Shamash, and that is one of the things that's been most affecting to me. So did I say my key word yet? Well, one of my key words is protocols. I think that it's really important to consult widely. And I was so touched when Mia Lopez and Roberta spoke at the Beyond the Spill conference and David Pellow was able to reach out to them and bring them in to speak.

Speaker4: [00:26:48] And one of the things that that may have began by saying, she said, Well, I wasn't born or I was just young at in nineteen sixty nine at the time of the spill. And that's all I had to say. And then there was a beat and I was thinking. But then she began to say some deeply significant things about the entire history in which the Santa Barbara oil spill takes place or took place. So she said, well, 90 percent of Shamash people have perished and the mission ization of this area. And so, she said. And so for us, this spill was a moment in time, and that broader context really has stuck with me. So I think it's very significant to consider always those protocols always reaching out to those community members. And for me, all along, the idea of the global south was as a figure and not as a geography. It always meant marginalized communities in the global north and indigenous communities and then elsewhere in the world where people may be communities present since time immemorial, but not go by the name indigenous. So all of those aspects were really important to me. So I guess protocol. Great.

Speaker5: [00:28:08] Ok, I'm Stephane Steffen. Yes, I'm a historian of West Africa. And also, I mean, as had said, it has been a great honor to be invited by Javier Ramona to join this team. And it has been an amazing journey and I've learned so much. And I mean, I I mean, I'm a historian who started as a tender historian, then moved into doing a big study on a hydroelectric dam. But I didn't really think of myself as an energy scholar. I kind of come from, you know, if you want social or cultural history. And so it really has been mind opening to be part of this, this conversation, I guess what I thought, what I wanted to bring to our conversations, to our seminars. It was important to be to kind of bring in the context I have worked in. And so that African context and when I was thinking about a key word, I think for me the key word is location, because I think location matters what energy justice means and and also what, you know, potential, you know, approaches to energy justice or to rectify injustice. They look very different, depending where you are. I mean, earlier in our in our symposium today, somebody brought up the issue of transition transition out of fossil fuel, which of course, is a big issue here in North America or channel in the in the in the global north. And somebody asked this question to a colleague in Ghana, and he kind of paused and transition out of what you know. I mean, transition looks very different if you live in a country which never was completely electrified, where most people never had a car, where actually the pollution or on a global on a global scale is is is quite low. So I think we have we we have to think about that. And I I think I was fortunate that, of course, the means which the Maryland seminar gave us, it also enabled us to to invite colleagues who are based on the African continent, who then could directly contribute to these conversations we've had here.

Speaker1: [00:30:21] Yeah, great. Thank you. This is David Pellow. And I want to just extend a big thanks to to Mona and Javier for for starting this, this this project off and for inviting me to be a part of this. And I feel like, you know, I've been along, I've been joining you, been along for the ride and really following your lead, really. And I appreciate your patience with me and I. Had a wonderful time, this has been an extraordinary year for me, I was just saying to to you, to Simone and Dominic that, you know, I'm on the other side of campus, I'm literally on the literally on the bluffs. I mean, we're about to fall off. In fact, one of my colleagues in environmental studies who's a geologist, Ed Keller, has said, Yeah, David, if you, you know, eat your your, your vegetables, your vitamins and tofu and you're around in a hundred years, you won't be in that building Brent Hall because that building won't be there. The erosion of the the beach there is eroding the bluffs. And so so I'm literally on the edge of campus. So this has really been really important for me to be engaged with with people and the center of campus in the arts and humanities. I'm a sociologist. I think of myself, maybe as an interpretive sociologist, interpretive social scientist, environmental social scientist and most of my research and teaching and and activism has been around environmental justice.

Speaker1: [00:31:41] And I will confess to you that only recently was I even made aware of the term energy justice. And so as I began to read and engage these concepts, theories and ideas and practices, it really expanded my mind and my thinking about the limits and and the horizons and possibilities of the field of environmental justice studies and climate justice studies as well, which really is in many ways I think is still emergent. So this has been really helpful for me to think about my, my role, my my status, my position in in the academy and and in the in the community. And so for me, a key word or key phrase perhaps is is multidisciplinary, but also multidisciplinary collaboration. And and that involves, of course, I mean, we have several disciplines represented around around this. This table, of course, with what anthropology, global studies, American studies, film and media studies, history, sociology, environmental studies. And that's just been extraordinary for me to to to understand how, how little I know how much reading I need to, to do to to to keep up to speed. And it's always fun, but also terrifying when you discover another field, another discipline that is already been doing what you have been doing or you would hope to be doing and aspire to be doing and thought would be cutting edge.

Speaker1: [00:33:05] But somebody has already been doing it for 20 some odd years, and that's often the case for me as a as a sociologist. We're just we're always just muddling around somewhere in the mid 20th century intellectually. And so so it's it's always an upgrade when I'm around colleagues like this. I think the last couple of things I'll say is that related to what I've said already, the the environmental humanities and the energy humanities for me have been really important to to learn about and to listen to folks who are doing work in that area precisely again, because I feel like in the social sciences and certainly in the sciences, I'm not seeing enough engagement with with those ideas. There's a physicist in my department who said at a faculty meeting, he said, You know what, if there's any area of scholarship that is going to give us some clues, some answers, a path forward for for addressing climate and energy crises. He says it's got to be the arts and humanities. And there was just this pause in the fact was like, Wait, Mel, you're a physicist. He goes, Yeah, yeah, and we've wrecked the world. We really do need to pay attention to to what folks in other disciplines are doing.

Speaker1: [00:34:13] And he he's been doing that himself. So ultimately, I would say the last key word, a key phrase I would use would be community building. This builds on what was said earlier about about protocol. So community building amongst scholars across various disciplines on campus and community building across those those artificial but but real lines and divides and divisions between the academy and the rest of the world between PhDs, between folks with with formal academic training and between organic intellectuals. And this has really been a treat and an incredibly enriching experience doing that, that work throughout the year and most specifically during this this spring quarter, focusing my entire class on collaboration between students, grads and undergrads and people in communities and non-governmental organizations, and that never, ever, ever would have happened if it had not been for the Mellon Sawyer seminar. My colleagues sitting around this table, I will confess to you, I've never done that before. Talk a good game. Maybe I don't even talk a good game and I talk a game, but this is the first time I've really focused a class on that. And so I want to thank you all for giving me the energy and the the space and the freedom and the license to do that.

Speaker2: [00:35:27] Well, one fabulous person that you've welcomed into your community for this process is Emily.

Speaker4: [00:35:34] And if we could just say that was one of our initial greatest achievement. Yes, Emily aboard Emily.

Speaker2: [00:35:43] Postdoctoral fellow for the seminar.

Speaker3: [00:35:46] That's right, so I joined after the seminar had already been conceived, but it's been such a joy to take part in this because my background is American studies sort of a mix of cultural history and media studies and practice and practice. I'm also a practicing artist and work with an artist book publisher called Mysteries Books. So being able to bring my background in the academy but also in arts into the seminar has been the most rewarding thing. And really, if I had to boil it down to the single most rewarding thing, it's been working with the students. So there are graduate fellows who work with me. There are undergraduate students who are participating in the seminar this quarter and they have been truly inspiring and they have really led the way on some of the most exciting projects that we've done. And I'll just mention two. One is a field guide to oil in Santa Barbara, which is this online map based on the field research that they did in the fall quarter under the direction of Mona and Javier. And in addition to going into the archive and talking to people in the community and going to these places and taking photos and videos, we were able to gather these materials together and put them up on a website as an archive and also as an exhibition. We were able to show it to everyone who joined us back in January to mark that 50th anniversary of the Santa Barbara oil spill. And it lives on online so you can take a virtual tour of five sites that are significant to the history of oil in this county. And an important part of that project, I think, is that we expand this sort of story of the Santa Barbara oil spill outside of downtown Santa Barbara or southern Santa Barbara County, which often gets so much of the focus.

Speaker3: [00:37:27] The story of oil in this county, you know, spans this county and continues to today. And so the other really exciting project ongoing project has been creating a website that gathers together local activist struggles and information on ways to get involved with those, and that lives on our Sawyer seminar website and all of that content. All of that research reaching out to community collaborators was done by the graduate fellows back in the fall. So you can go there and see what's happening with these proposed new wells and canyon. What's happening with propositions to ban fracking in various counties of California? And we've also had a chance to do pop up lunches that focus on bringing undergrads into that conversation. How can they get involved in local activism? And that will culminate at the end of this spring quarter with the projects that our students are doing with these local organizations. So between the field guide, which sort of exists as a map and archive and the local activism web page, I think my sort of contribution to the seminar has been sort of being able to connect different locations. So my word would be map, I guess. So students and maps, you know, working with students to create these maps that connect various locations, whether hyperlocal, you know, within the county or connecting to, you know, the sort of global economies that Xaviera mentioned, the way that oil, capital and oil culture extends from this place across the globe.

Speaker1: [00:38:47] It's nice because maps came up in that last panel and an interesting way thinking about maps both as as kind of infrastructures. They can be infrastructures of domination and dispossession, but also infrastructures of enablement and gathering and and problem solving, hopefully. So I have a couple of questions I want to depose and these are these are little open ended. So whoever wants to jump in, please feel free. But a couple of things that struck me in the course of the last two days, which was a very stimulating, well curated gathering. So again, kudos to all here for your roles in it. The question of justice across generations and justice in time and justice and how we conceive of that across cultures is something that was a touchpoint in many of the conversations we had. And there's a big debate in philosophy now over what's called intergenerational ethics and how we how we think about the world we're leaving to future generations and to what extent we see this in the Extinction Rebellion politics, too. Greta Thunberg, I mean, the youth speaking back to the generations that have done so much damage about accountability and about needing rapid, uncomfortable changes. So I was wondering if anyone wanted to talk a little bit about that and kind of what you've taken away from this experience in terms of thinking about to what extent is there a hard kernel of justice we can be certain of? And to what extent is it really something that has to be defined by people in conversation at particular times, you know, doing their best to think about the future, but also understanding they don't really have the ability to control what that future may may contain.

Speaker4: [00:40:16] I mean, I'll just say I think the question sort of hits the nail on the head in terms of the difficulties, the challenges we face on the one hand. And one of the ways I think about it is that we live at a time where we have so much information and knowledge. You know, it's not no longer like the Akosombo Dam in Ghana that Stephane has written about where they could have said in the nineteen sixties, Well, we didn't know what the effects of these dams would be. We didn't know. What the ecological effects, the social effects, we thought everyone would be better off. We now have accumulated experience and well-documented experience that we know very well with the negative impacts of most of our energy systems. Ah, so we can no longer claim to not know. At the same time, you know, I study environmental impact assessments that are premised on this idea of exhaustive knowledge gathering of each locale and each little project, as if each time we could perfect our decision making process. And I think in a way, you know, the last two days and Kyle White's keynote thinking about consent and participation, I think does challenge us to be able to hold both registers at once and every single day and then all of our actions. So thinking in our research and our scholarship, being able to take the longer DeRay into account. But perhaps when it comes to thinking and more engaged ways, having to embrace perhaps part of the urgency or part of the moment of crisis or part of the policy process, while constantly while never forgetting, you know, the longer drive, it's the power imbalances and inequalities.

Speaker3: [00:42:00] I'll add to that because I think sort of the scales at which we're talking about our conceptualization of justice across time and across space, you know, the symposium that was just held was called Recentering Energy Justice. And I think that one thing to make clear is that it's not recentering to any sort of given true center in which we will sort of discover what is that definition of justice or kernel of justice. I think what what the interdisciplinarity of this project brings, what thinking across humanity is based thinking and from different social science approaches really gives us, is this idea that we need a, as you know, multipolar exploded idea of like that there is any single location from which we can understand what just action looks like or what just procedure looks like, or even just, you know, I think again, going back to Kyle Palace White's revelatory keynote address at this at this particular symposium to really think about where we're even beginning from, like what is the premise at which we're even beginning to think about what what would a more just world look like if we're already starting at a at a place of embroil deep injustices that are intergenerational, that are well beyond the human world or experience in relationship to energy systems? So I think displacing the normative sort of ideas of how we think about justice is something that has really emerged from the conversations over the last two days. And then I think also across the entire year,

Speaker4: [00:43:36] I've had that same experience and you said it so well. I've always thought that one of the roles of the humanities scholar is to open up more questions, whereas if you think of scientists, they're often in favor of disambiguation or that kind of thing. But but humanities scholars are in favor of ambiguous. And so I would also say that one of my takeaways from this entire year is that it's very complicated and it's not as though everyone can suddenly have the political will to enact a just energy solution because there is no one just energy solution. And I remember this came home to me when Dustin Mulvaney, who was here over the last couple of days, but also he spoke at our solar symposium, which we call the solar array. And he his book is called Solar Power, and he talks about all the different stakeholders in the desert, where one might think that one could put a solar array, but it's much more complicated than that. I had come into this whole thing thinking, OK, if we can just get the general public on board with getting off fossil fuels and moving to hydro and solar, then our problems will be solved. Well, it's completely complicated. And so his research was extremely illuminating and thinking about all the different stakeholders in the desert from the particular lizards that inhabit that area. And then, of course, the need to consult with tribal peoples who have sovereign territory there and then environmentalists at municipalities, everybody else. And so I guess at this point, I gather that one would want to put solar cells, solar panels or a solar array on brownfields or on cleaned up toxic sites that aren't being used for anything. But the process of consultation needs to be there in order to move to a just society or just implementation. But I think also it may be the case that there is no one route to justice, as Mona was just saying that one one thing. That's just for a particular group, may not be just for another group, so it has to be a process of coming to consensus and it will necessarily be imperfect.

Speaker5: [00:45:55] I want to jump in here too. I mean, in a way, I think. I mean, China really formulated this well, this idea of working towards a consensus, which I think means inclusion and inclusion also means the ability to listen. And it means perhaps to wait and step back and create a space where other voices can be heard. And so often in the policy world, you know, kind of environmental impact assessment studies, it's just to check a box. You know, you've consulted with the impacted communities, but it doesn't mean they have any power to stop or read or change a project. They just kind of you've done it. And what really inclusion means that that that a variety of people, groups, communities are part of the conversation or part of the come to the table, from the from the from the beginning. And of course, when, you know, for instance, power project is being planned. And of course, I what I hope as a historian that these conversations are historically informed and so often there is there. Is this an unwillingness actually to look at other historical examples because as as Xaviera had earlier said, I mean, we have now large, large hydroelectric dams, you know, for instance, the African continent for half for half a century in this country, for four hundred, for almost a hundred years. But we are unwilling actually to to to look at the historical experiences and incorporate that into into our our conversations.

Speaker1: [00:47:29] And if I could pick up on that really important point, I think Kyle Power's White's presentation and a number of other conversations that we've had over the year have really pointed out what indigenous scholars, indigenous study scholars, indigenous activists have long pointed out that, you know, the rest of us, those of us are settlers or guests who are non-indigenous or suddenly freaking out about climate change and anthropogenic, you know, climate change. And oh no, we only have 11 eleven and a half years to to avert catastrophe. Well, if we pay attention through intergenerational justice from a perspective of many indigenous communities, they've been through similar catastrophes and sometimes worse and have often lived through it and lived to tell the story and have survived and thrived. So I think it's really important. As you were saying to, you know, to enact the very important skill of listening to paying attention to to to history and one one indigenous leader to match leader who I think Janet referenced earlier, Roberta Reyes. Cordero put it this way at one of our symposia recently where she said, you know, in terms of holding simultaneously the past, the present and the future and walking lightly and ethically on this planet, she said. May we all strive to be good ancestors, and I love that that will stay with me forever. Maybe we always strive to be good ancestors. So that's that's one way I think about intergenerational justice. And I think I think Roberta for that, that wisdom. It's interesting because, you know, I think we've had a lot of bad ancestors, but go back to Javier's point, sometimes they thought they were doing the right thing.

Speaker1: [00:49:06] A lot of the current problems created by mid 20th century modernism that thought we could engineer our way out of everything. And let's be honest, that mentality is still here, and it infects many corners of universities like this one and race where we are. And so I think this raises a real question as scholars, just to build on your point, David, if we really want to take indigenous knowledge as seriously and I think you have done a remarkable job in this event and really giving voice to indigenous knowledge is from a number of different places across the world. But sitting here as a group of settlers and guests, you know, what can we do as scholars and institutions like this? I'm not saying this is what's happening here, but one could imagine in other parts of this university, people might be a little dismissive about those perspectives and say, Well, you know, listen, we have this, you know, basically essentially supremacist manifest destiny. I mean, they don't call it that, but sometimes one feels that that's what's going on. We've really got it figured out and the continual tendency at universities, even when they're taking climate issues seriously to double down upon engineering responses always and always and always in not thinking about the cultural, political, social, behavioral, ethical dimensions of these problems, I just wanted to open that up. If anyone had thoughts about, you know, what could we be doing? And since a lot of the folks who listen to this podcast are people who have a kind of foot in the university game somewhere, maybe we could share some of those ideas.

Speaker4: [00:50:30] People are. People are pointing at you. For some reason. I'm the host doc.

Speaker3: [00:50:33] I know you're the future. You the precarious laborer. Yeah. Well, the word that keeps coming to mind is Janet's word of protocol. And I think that that has come through this year in a number of different ways, certainly in terms of planning events and wanting to bring in as many voices as we can, but also in terms of collaborating outside of the university. So I know something that our students are really committed to is figuring out what scholar activism looks like. How do you theorize it? How do you frame it in your mind? But also, how do you just do it on the ground working within a university, but also wanting to sort of break down that, you know, gown to town divide, you know, the sort of divide between the university and outside? And we've really been grappling with that this quarter, the most of all these quarters this quarter. The theme of the seminar is participation. So David Pellow is teaching this quarter, and each of the students is working with a different NGO or local environmental organization. And part of the process of them creating this collaboration is figuring out what the protocols are for working with these organizations. And what does it mean to be a scholar activist? Are they, you know, going into communities, extracting information and leaving and writing beautiful papers about it? Or are they creating things that are really useful to these movements, to these ongoing struggles in this area? And how do you do that in an academic calendar? You know, that's also sort of the bottom line.

Speaker3: [00:51:57] And so I think seeing the seeing the students in our seminars grapple with some of these questions has been really instructive for me as an artist who makes collaborative art projects and likes to do public work, figuring out in each case, and it's different in each case what the protocols would be and how you can approach those in a way that is equitable, but that absolutely recognizes the hierarchies that you bring coming from a place like UCSB or from a funding structure like the Mellon Sawyer seminar. I want to build on what Emily is talking about just to add that I think and again, one of the takeaways from from this entire experience for me has been around pedagogy. And if I have a plea to faculty who are invested in these issues and administrators who who also are on board, it's really to make the space that we've had the privilege of having in the of seminar to be experimental and playful with pedagogy in terms of thinking about our roles in training graduate students, how we bring them together to think about the problems that are not only a concern to their disciplines, but these broader the questions that are urgent, right, and perhaps have been for a long time about our relationship to energy into the environment and and and sort of just action and to really just to make the space with whether it's within your own classroom and relationship to students or mentorship, mentorship beyond campuses in the communities and your relationships with colleagues.

Speaker3: [00:53:27] But really, I feel like this has been an exceptional I mean, I feel like I'm at an exceptional university that values interdisciplinary work and and really like in sincere ways and kind of can put the money where their mouth is in that regard. So that's that's one thing being in an institution like this. But I think as someone who's just started on in an academic career, you know, this is my third year in my position as assistant professor to be able to have the space to just really think very freely about what does it mean to train graduate students who are invested in questions of of justice and ethical approaches to thinking about our relationship to the world and sort of the moment that we're in? It has been transformative for me and I know it's been also for for our students. And I just think that if there was more of that, it might start to actually change the nature of the relationship between the university and and elsewhere.

Speaker4: [00:54:25] And just to be really concrete and to give an example. So through this field guide that Emily was describing earlier, our students, you know, we they went out, you know, we really didn't do very much at all. Aside from getting the ball rolling, but they went out and did these very, you know, place based research projects that some of which have to do with ongoing struggles against oil development in Santa Barbara. And have they so they have attended public hearings and EIA meetings and gone out to protest and worked with these local NGOs, all in ways which are helping them or exposing them to the complexities of the community, right? You know, there's this is a much more diverse area than is often portrayed or thought of, right? We have local too much indigenous groups. We also have a large Latino population, a large farmworker and undocumented population, very high levels of poverty as well. And I think the students, through all the work that this Mel and Sawyer has has enabled has really allowed them to go out and engage with the with the diversity of our local community, of our local Santa Barbara community. And so I think that in terms of what can we do, I think is. Really important. You know, that's that's one of the I understand that as one of these creative pedagogies that builds on protocol, but also David's key word of collaboration, I was thinking of collectivity. I think it's for me. It's been really fun to. I feel like we've been collectively mentoring these, this group of students. That hasn't always been the same group. Some come in and out, but there's a critical mass that has remained sort of engaged and and sort of through this collective mentorship. The sum is greater than the parts in a way.

Speaker4: [00:56:15] So I think that's been fabulous. We keep coming back to the field guide. And I want to come back to the field guide again and again because it has been this incredible work of art that some people might think of as a tool. And so I wanted to just compliment you again and and but use it to broach the conversation about media and about mapping. Dominic, you brought up the issue of mapping before and how sure, you know, with all these treaties, it was a way to map the land in order to displace indigenous populations. And so their areas kept getting smaller and smaller. But now there's such a thing as counter mapping and resistance mapping in the words of the geographer Carl Sack. And so I think that the field guide is a counter guide to Santa Barbara to oil and Santa Barbara because it's very much at odds with whatever surveying was done in the early days to establish where they could put the oil fields and the oil derricks. And so I really love that, and it's I don't see it as a value neutral or transparent tool, but as a media object in and of itself. And it's a way to help disenchanted us from all these other massive technological infrastructures that we so often rely on to help us get get over this problem that the technology itself has created. So if you think about this whole ecology of extraction, production, consumption, representation, wastage, e wastage, repurposing, it's all there. So how can you intervene in that? And I think the field guide is a fantastic example of a way to use media. That's low tech sort of citizen science oriented and a form of counter mapping and counter media technology sizing or something like that. So thanks again for that.

Speaker2: [00:58:14] So one of the really illuminating moments in Kyle Polis White's keynote yesterday was his thinking and sharing on the concept of consent. And when we did the podcast with Kyle, we talked quite a bit about consent, and that's clearly a key element in terms of bringing indigenous perspectives to questions of energy and environment and justice, trans generationally and otherwise, and consent for him. As I understand it has to do with relationships of kinship and having a sensibility of kinship with other human beings and with non-human others. It has to do with relationally. It has to do with reciprocity and it has to do with flexibility, immutability in the sense that we can all work in a way that he calls coordination. So Kyle talked a lot about consent, but I really stayed with coordination, and he spoke about how on a kind of planetary level, we're not coordinated and we need to get that way. So one question to you all is how do you see people in positions such as ourselves working in the academic world? We do. What are our skills of coordination in the sense that Kyle might be thinking of it? What is what are the specialties? The kind of the expert perspectives, the personal perspectives that academics can bring to something as important and difficult to grasp as justice?

Speaker5: [00:59:50] I think in a way, the opportunity the Melon Seminar has given us that we as a group of six coming from very different disciplines, different way of thinking, different ways of producing knowledge has given us the opportunity to to look at an issue in a in a from multiple perspectives and in a way that's in a way the first the first step in doing that type of coordination so that you are realizing that the question needs to be needs to be looked at from from these on these multiple perspectives. And I think, of course, we are all what we share. We are at this university or we are all in academia, but our our eagerness and willingness and at least making a serious attempt to open up our conversation. Beyond the university and bringing other perspective, bringing perspective from outside the university, from outside the specific location of Santa Barbara of North America, from from from my interest is from various locations on the African continent that we are in a way, this seminar has become a coordination point which has allowed these these types of exchanges to go on. And I think it's of course not a solution. But I think it's an important beginning and I hope that all of us in in our various ways and you are you listeners out there find ways to to to build on this experience.

Speaker3: [01:01:22] That was really well articulated, and I would just build on it to say that I think one of the things that we've been able to do through the seminar and that academics have the privilege to do is to hold space and within that space to determine sort of who you know. It can often be extremely exclusionary, but to actually make that an inclusive process, to think expansively about what that could mean, what who could be participant in the conversations that we have the privilege to sort of curate and and and sort of really clear space for and also to be able to call out the omissions from historical record or from the perspectives that are already being upheld as the ones that are giving us sort of some kind of truth or accurate picture of of how we should understand the kinds of questions we should ask about the world that we live in and to reframe or shift or to sort of change the location from which we're asking questions and to really sort of, you know, to invite new voices who are often spoken for into the conversation and sort of center them as as sort of being knowledge producers.

Speaker1: [01:02:35] Yeah, this is Dave, and I just want to pick up on on those points. You know, when I think about coordination for me, I think about, well, when I was young, when I was a kid and my dad, Oh, you're so uncoordinated, you need you need to practice these skills, learn how to ride a bike, learn how to do these things and then you'll become coordinated. And yeah, it's like exercising a muscle and developing ways of being and doing things and and just picking up on on what Mona and and Stephane were just saying. I think one of the things we've been doing, maybe taking baby steps toward, is coordinating with indigenous communities here, and I certainly don't want to speak for our local Chumash indigenous leaders. But but having heard from them, they have said that, you know, it is this year as a result of the Melon Sawyer seminar and building on some of the incredible work that Janet and others have done prior to this year with indigenous communities. Feels like for for many folks, some I've heard from the Chumash community that this is a new relationship that they are experiencing with this university and that that is so meaningful, at least as it's been communicated to me. Because precisely because this university is right on us, space territory, land and waters that are traditional indigenous Chumash territories and buildings, at least one building on this campus actually holds artifacts, relics and I believe even bodies remains of of local Chumash indigenous peoples. The Berkeley well, several campuses. But I think UCSB xb, our humanities and social science building on this campus, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Speaker1: [01:04:16] And so when some of our local Chumash leaders have come into that building, they've reminded of this and us of this and how painful and difficult this is for for for them. But they have communicated to us that we are taking baby steps, but they appreciate these, these steps that we are taking. And I think it's really important because it's also at a time when the group, the American Indian and Indigenous Collective on campus, which is a group of professors, faculty, staff and students who have long been been been active, developing an indigenous, indigenous studies, minor indigenous studies on community programming and are now seeing us as as allies. And that's something that I'm always being mindful of and have been stumbling and muddling through. The last thing I'll I'll say for that, that is that I think, you know, one of the things that you saw at this symposium that you've seen at other symposiums that we've hosted was bringing inviting Chumash folks to to offer a welcome or an offering. And they did that here. But at a previous symposium, they did that as well. And one leader in particular, two or three of them, I think Roberto Reyes Cordero in particular gave a full on lecture, which was just magnificent. Fourteen thousand years of Chumash history on this site, in this community, in this region, really, really educating folks and many of my students who are in the audience. I came away from that so blown away.

Speaker1: [01:05:45] So move that they they change the entire focus of their their final research projects in this class that I was teaching that quarter to that particular issue. And I guess I'll just say that you know this this space, this institution may always be an imperial or colonial institution, but I think we are seeing us sort of manage that, that tension and in ways that I think are productive. And so I'm I'm taking baby steps and learning how to be an ally. And it's been again made possible because of the Mellons lawyer seminar and the openness of the faculty to to these conversations and frankly, the insistence of our local indigenous Chumash leaders on being heard. And so if I can say one more thing I'm pleased to see. Just in the last week, some indigenous leaders, local leaders reaching out to folks on campus. We're now in charge of and coordinating expansionary moves that this campus is making into preserves, nature preserves and and so Chumash folks are saying, you know what, we wouldn't have even tried to have these conversations before. Now we are feeling that the bridges have been built. They have initiated that bridge building. And now that they are able to to to at least broach those subjects, how do we start with consultation? How do we move beyond consultation to perhaps consent to developing real partnerships and collaborations and and hopefully equivalent power relations or at least respectful power relations between indigenous communities and this university? So so I think we're moving in that direction slowly and hopefully surely. Janet?

Speaker4: [01:07:20] Well, you said that so beautifully. I'll just add one little thing, which is that the facilitation of students to go out into the community and learn from community leaders and to ally with groups that are active outside the university and the community is great. But then I think also reciprocally, as we bring members of the community into the university, it's important to establish the actual infrastructure and to give the resources to these people from the community who are coming in and not just assume that we can engage someone to give a welcome or even speak on a panel, but to set up groups like the one you alluded to and and actually invest university resources in that infrastructure. So it's not only our willingness that's on the table, but actually to to set up a possibility, a real possibility for that exchange to take place. Just to add to that kinship coordination, as David was saying, it all takes practice over time. And I think I just want to touch on what Emily said about precarious labor. You know, the university is a place of privilege, but there's also deep inequalities within the university and the precariousness of a lot of labor in the University of Staff. Of some faculty lecturers, postdocs, PhDs does not help write in all of these efforts because, as Janet and David were saying, these are relationships that take a long time to build. So, yeah, I think that's another thing to be to highlight.

Speaker1: [01:08:58] Well, put, well put. So I got a final question for you. It's kind of like a dream nightmare scenario. And at the end of every great collaborative project, there are loose ends and sometimes those loose ends become the seed corn for the next season. And I'm calling you from the Mellon Foundation. I've heard great things about what you guys did this year. Let's run it back one more time. Let's have another year worth of activities and alliance building. If that were to happen, what would you do? And again, take a deep breath because it's not necessarily happening. All you exhausted people. I know it's been a hard run, you know, so far. But what were some of the things that you would do if you if you could carry this forward?

Speaker3: [01:09:40] Definitely more dancing, more dance.

Speaker1: [01:09:41] Yeah.

Speaker5: [01:09:43] I mentioned earlier location. So if we had an opportunity to do another symposium, I would like to have a symposium, not here, but in Chile or one one of one of the native lands here in the United States or in Ghana, West Africa. Just kind of to take us to a different location, the different site, which would enable different types of conversation. That's what I would like to do.

Speaker3: [01:10:08] I would make an effort to engage even more undergraduate students in the work that we're doing. The most exciting thing I think about the spring seminar is that, as David joked earlier, we have more undergraduate students than graduate students in that class who are all working with these local organizations and using a whole bunch of different skills and coming from a whole bunch of different disciplinary backgrounds and personal backgrounds. And so building in more events and more opportunities, both in coursework but also outside of coursework for undergraduates to get involved for graduate students to mentor undergraduate students is something that. Would be great to see in the future. I would say also creating just the creation, the creativity, sort of. I think we've only scratched the surface in terms of the kinds of outputs that are possible through both the sort of the generative work of students and all the sort of the faculty. And we often are know we have so many ideas as faculty and then no time to do anything. And actually, if we just sort of sort of give resources to our students, they often are able to kind of to really run with things and to create amazing outputs. So I mean, and today I should also say that Dominic and Simone gave an amazing presentation about all the many, many ways that they take their knowledge production into many different kinds of spaces and mediums, and it was incredibly inspiring. So really, I think just sort of blowing open the doors on what's possible in terms of creating, you know, anything from, you know, experiential installations to field guides that are more interactive,

Speaker4: [01:11:37] Participatory GI mapping. I think, you know, it's endless.

Speaker3: [01:11:43] And we we have I'm in a film and media studies department with Janet, and we have so many resources at our fingertips that we didn't even get to really engage. And so I think just sort of taking that to the next level would be my dream.

Speaker1: [01:11:56] Well, I'd love to develop a podcast. I tell you, give me a half an hour and I'll trade you on. One of the things that we've certainly talked about is putting together a special issue of the journal. And Janet could talk more about that, and maybe it would also include an edited book. I think what we're also seeing already is a real push and a transformation in the way we think about our pedagogy, the way that we think about the curriculum and our departments and in our fields. So I think that's going to be a lasting and ongoing legacy. There has been serious talk, and I'm quite certain there will be serious action about new sort of exhibitions and ways of curating what what people are doing, building on the incredible work that Emily role has been doing. And just just last night at the reception for for this, this symposium at a graduate student come up to me and make a pitch for for them to have essentially a fellowship, a graduate fellowship next year to do the work of sustaining many of the collaborations that that have been initiated this year between faculty and students and community organizations. And that would build nicely on the work that we've done from fall, winter and spring. And that was music to my ears because one of the collaborating organizations in the region approached me and said, You know, we do activism and run campaigns on environmental justice, immigrant justice, climate justice, agricultural worker justice, reproductive justice. And we would love it if UC Santa Barbara could be our university partner going forward indefinitely in generating research that would support these campaigns, research that would not only support the campaigns, but that would also push the various fields that we're working in in new directions. And I said, Are you kidding me? Sign me up. So. So I think it's going to happen and we'll we'll see where.

Speaker4: [01:13:54] That's a great example of the university furnishing the resources to do something that is also helping the community.

Speaker3: [01:14:00] That's terrific.

Speaker1: [01:14:02] Well, thank you all for inviting us to be part of this really wonderful gathering and thank you all for the work that you're doing. And I do hope that magical renewal of Mellon funding or not, that you will continue to keep working on this path because there's a lot of good work to be done to become good ancestors.

Speaker4: [01:14:20] Thank you all. Thank you so much for inviting us to participate.