Intersectional Climate: Conversations Towards COP26 - Symposium

About

This online international symposium celebrates climate practices that prioritise ecological, political and poetic engagement with communities, places and disciplines. Such practices enable greater societal solidarity for tackling the Climate Crisis and with respect to the forthcoming UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, 01 - 12 November, 2021. 

Organised into two seminars, 'Climate Change Practices' and 'Reinventing Planetary Practices and Imaginaries', eight invited keynote speakers from India, South Africa, the US and the UK, will present intersectional practices which extend across multiple disciplines: from architecture, to the arts, humanities, sciences and technologies, and from within different regional communities. 

Schedule

Climate Change Practices

Tuesday 16 March, 16:00-18:00 GMT 

• Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha (University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University): 'Ocean of Wetness'
• Lindsay Bremner (University of Westminster): 'Monsoonal Multiplicities' 
• Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió (UC San Diego) 'The Red Deal: Articulating Indigenous Design Sovereignty'
• Lisa Garforth (Newcastle University): 'Green Utopianism after the End: Practices and Imaginaries for Hard Times' 
• Chair: Tim Waterman.

Reinventing Planetary Practices and Imaginaries 

Thursday 18 March, 14:00-16:00 GMT

• Paul Gilroy (UCL): 'Overdevelopment, planetarity and racial hierarchy'
• Vandana Shiva (Navdanya Earth University): 'Earth Care is Climate Action'
• Chair: Peg Rawes.

Speaker biographies

Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha

Anuradha Mathur an architect and landscape architect is Professor at Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Dilip da Cunha is an architect, planner and Adjunct Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. He has previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Parsons School of Design and Harvard University. He is recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2020.

Anuradha and Dilip are authors of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001); Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore's Terrain (2006); Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009) and co-editors of Design in the Terrain of Water (2014). These books accompanied major public exhibitions that form an intrinsic part of their practice. Dilip is also author of a new book, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent, (2019). In 2017, Mathur and da Cunha launched Ocean of Wetness, a design platform that seeks to situate the past, present, and future of habitation in a ubiquitous wetness rather than on a land-water surface.

Lindsay Bremner

Lindsay Bremner is a research architect whose current work focuses on human-more-than-human entanglements in oceanic worlds. She currently holds European Research Council grant no. 679873 for Monsoon Assemblages, a project exploring these themes in three Bay of Bengal cities - Chennai, Dhaka and Yangon. Lindsay began her academic and professional life in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she published, lectured and exhibited widely on the transformation of Johannesburg after apartheid. She taught architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, at Temple University in Philadelphia, and at MIT as a Visiting Professor, before taking up her current post as Professor of Architecture at the University of Westminster in London, where she is Director of Research in the School of Architecture and Cities. Lindsay holds a BArch from the University of Cape Town and an MArch and DScArch from the University of the Witwatersrand. 

Lisa Garforth

Lisa Garforth lectures in Sociology at Newcastle University. Her work explores visions of environmental futures in relation to social and ecopolitical theory focusing particularly on affective imaginaries of better green worlds in utopian fiction (Green Utopias: Environmental Hope Before and After Nature Polity 2017). She is currently working on postnatural landscapes in contemporary speculative fiction; empirical approaches to readers and reading in the Anthropocene; and a book exploring the relationship between science fiction and sociology.

Paul Gilroy

Paul Gilroy is one of the foremost theorists of race and racism working and teaching in the world today. Author of foundational and highly influential books such as There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Against Race (2000), Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) and Darker Than Blue (2010), alongside numerous key articles, essays and critical interventions, Paul's is a unique voice that speaks to the centrality and tenacity of racialized thought and representational practices in the modern world. He has transformed thinking across disciplines, from ethnic studies, British and American literature, African American studies, Black British Studies, transatlantic history and critical race theory to postcolonial theory. He has contributed to and shaped thinking on afro-modernity, aesthetic practices, diasporic poetics and practices, sound and image worlds.

Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió

Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió is an architect and assistant professor in Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California, San Diego. Manuel's research focuses on the historical intersections between architecture and geopolitics — particularly the relation between settler colonialism and racial capitalism — to think through how modern architecture operates in ecological, political, and economic terms. Recent publications include, 'Palm Springs and the Nomos of Modernity: Prefabricated Steel Houses, Automation, and Settler Colonialism in Postwar America, 1943–1968', in Productive Universals — Specific Situations: Critical Engagements in Art, Architecture, and Urbanism (2019, Sternberg Press), edited by Anne Kockelkorn and Nina Zschocke; and 'Infrastructures of Dependency: U.S. Steel and Architectural Expertise in Palm Springs, California, and Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela, 1940–1965', in Systems and the South: Architecture in Development (forthcoming from Routledge), edited by the Aggregate Architecture Collaborative.   

Dr Vandana Shiva

Vandana Shiva is trained as a physicist and gained her PhD in ‘Hidden Variables and Non-locality in Quantum Theory’ from the University of Western Ontario in Canada. She later shifted to interdisciplinary research in science, technology and environmental policy, which she carried out at the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore. In 1982, she founded an independent institute, the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in Dehra Dun dedicated to high quality and independent research to address the most significant ecological and social issues of our times, in close partnership with local communities and social movements.  In 1991, she founded Navdanya, a national movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seed, the promotion of organic farming and fair trade. In 2004 she started Bija Vidyapeeth, an international college for sustainable living in Doon Valley in collaboration with Schumacher College, U.K. 

Vandana combines intellectual enquiry with activism. In 2003 Time Magazine identified her as an environmental ‘hero’, and Asia Week has called her one of the five most powerful communicators of Asia. In 2010 Forbes Magazine identified Shiva as one of the 'Top Seven Most Powerful Women on the Globe'. Vandana has received honorary Doctorates from Paris, Western Ontario, Oslo and Guelph universities. Among her many awards are the Alternative Nobel Prize (Right Livelihood Award, 1993), Order of the Golden Ark, Global 500 Award of UN and Earth Day International Award. Lennon ONO grant for peace award by Yoko Ono (2009), Sydney Peace Prize (2010), Doshi Bridgebuilder Award, Calgary Peace Prize and Thomas Merton Award (2011), the Fukuoka Award and Prism of Reason Award (2012), the Grifone d’Argento prize, and MIDORI Prize for Biodiversity (2016); the Veerangana Award; Sanctuary Wildlife Award, and International Environment Summit & Award (2018).  

More information

• Image: Cilaos, La Réunion, by Kitri Durelle, 2017