As a follow-on to the UCHI-facilitated UConn Reads panel on Irish Travellers (April 2021), Oein DeBhairduin, multi-award-winning Irish Traveller activist, scholar, and co-founder of LGBT+ Tara (Traveller and Roma Alliance) will discuss Why the Moon Travels (Skein, 2020), his retelling of Irish Traveller oral lore illustrated by Traveller artist Leanne McDonagh. This is the first book of Traveller folktales by a member of that indigenous and historically non-literate and nomadic Irish minority. In a public event open to all, DeBhairduin and McDonagh will speak to Mary Burke’s Honors Short Story online class about the opportunities and challenges of gathering and illustrating the oral tales. Contact mary.burke@uconn.edu for WebEx link and accommodations.
Join us for this panel discussion on Irish Travellers, part of the UConn Reads program, which focuses on The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of Chicago, 2016) by Amitav Ghosh.
The panel, organized by Mary Burke (Professor of English, University of Connecticut), considers global issues of environmental racism, environmental justice, and climate crisis with specific reference to Travellers, a racialized and historically nomadic indigenous Irish ethnic minority. Travellers’ traditional lifestyle, centered around mobile recycle and repair services offered to dominant Irish society, was an inadvertently environmentalist practice that was repressed and degraded by postwar Ireland’s coercive settlement policies, the wider implications of which will be read against the coming climate crisis and its threat to make refugees of millions with no cultural memory of the nomadic mode upon which to draw. The panel consists of UConn’s Mary Burke, author of a cultural history of Travellers with Oxford UP, UMass Amherst’s Malcolm Sen, editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Irish Literature and the Environment, and photographer Jamie Johnson, who has just published a collection of photographs of contemporary Traveller children. Leanne McDonagh (Traveller artist) and Mícheál Ó hAodha (scholar-activist) will serve as respondents.
Join this panel discussion by Native scholars and artists on climate justice, part of the UConn Reads program which focuses on The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of Chicago, 2016) by Amitav Ghosh.
We don’t have a climate crisis. We are experiencing the centuries long consequences of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Indigenous scholars and artists on this panel discuss the impact of climate change on Indigenous communities, their experiences on the front lines of struggle, and the ways in which their work aims to heighten awareness of the issues. Also, in a time when the dominant patterns of belief and practice are being widely recognized as integrally related to the interconnected crises of our time, they center Indigenous knowledges as competing, legitimate and vital ways of living in good relation.
The panel is organized by Sandy Grande (Professor of Political Science and Native American and Indigenous Studies, University of Connecticut), who’ll be moderating. Also affiliated with American Studies, Philosophy, and the Race, Ethnicity and Politics program, Grande is the author of Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought and numerous book chapters and articles. She is also a founding member of New York Stands for Standing Rock, a group of scholars and activists that forwards the aims of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty and resurgence.
The Panelists
Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. She is a land and water protector and an activist for justice, sovereignty, and well-being. A Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, she is based in Lenapehoking / New York City. Emily is of the Yup’ik Nation, and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and care processions, they engage audienceship within and through space, time, and environment- interacting with a place’s architecture, peoples, history and role in building futures. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future. Emily hosts monthly ceremonial fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Arts Center and Karyn Recollet. She was a co-compiler of the document, Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts and is part of an advisory group, with Reuben Roqueni, Ed Bourgeois, Lori Pourier, Ronee Penoi, and Vallejo Gantner developing a First Nations Performing Arts Network.
Anne Spice is Acting Assistant Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Ryerson University. Spice is a Tlingit member of Kwanlin Dun First Nation, a queer Indigenous feminist and anti-colonial organizer, and a PhD candidate in anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work is in the tradition of feminist activist ethnography, and supports Indigenous land defense against settler state and extractive industry invasion. Her writing has been published in Environment and Society, Jacobin, The New Inquiry, and Asparagus Magazine.
Melanie K. Yazzie (Diné), Assistant Professor of Native American Studies & American Studies at the University of New Mexico, is bilagaana born for Ma’iideeshgiizhinii (Coyote Pass Clan). She has published articles and book reviews in Environment & Society, Wicazo Sa Review, Studies in American Indian Literature, American Indian Quarterly, Social Text, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society (DIES), and American Quarterly.
Join this panel discussion on truth, democracy, and climate change, part of the UConn Reads program which focuses on The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of Chicago, 2016) by Amitav Ghosh.
The climate crisis facing our society isn’t only an environmental crisis; it is also an urgent political and epistemological problem.
For decades, climate scientists have been warning that greenhouse gas emissions are changing the climate, destroying biodiversity, and threatening human health. By this point, the evidence is overwhelming and the scientific consensus well-documented.
Still, significant segments of the public (especially in Anglophone countries) remain unconvinced, with positions on climate change polarized along partisan lines. Denialism – usually defined as the employment of rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of legitimate debate about a question the relevant community of experts regards as settled – persists in many quarters and effectively dominates one of two major American political parties. Evidently, warning the public about climate change is one thing; getting people to accept it is another; and translating popular acceptance into effective government policy a further matter still.
Why do so many people, in the face of so much scientific evidence and expert consensus, remain so staunchly unconvinced? How can science advocates persuade skeptics to take action? What should liberal democratic societies do about polarization and anti-science propaganda? And what is the proper role for science in a democratic society?
Join us for a discussion of the political and epistemological dimensions of science denial with eminent scholars.
The panel is organized by Thomas Bontly (Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Connecticut), who’ll be moderating. Bontly’s research centers on several interrelated issues: the nature of mind, the basis of meaning, and the multifarious relations between both of these and the physical. His research interests also include various topics in metaphysics (especially the nature of causation), epistemology, metaphilosophy, the philosophy of biology, and environmental ethics.
The Panelists
Elizabeth Anderson is John Dewey Distinguished University Professor, John Rawls Collegiate Professor, and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Value in Ethics and Economics, The Imperative of Integration, and, most recently, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It), as well as articles on value theory, the ethical limitations of markets, facts and values in social scientific research, feminist and social epistemology, racial integration and affirmative action, rational choice and social norms, democratic theory, egalitarianism, and the history of ethics (focusing on Kant, Mill, and Dewey).
Kent Holsinger is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, Vice Provost for Graduate Education, and Dean of The Graduate School at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on the evolution and genetics of plants. He has studied the evolution of plant mating systems; explored how basic principles of ecology, evolutionary biology, and systematics should influence conservation decisions; and developed statistical methods for analyzing genetic diversity in spatially structured populations.
Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Lecturer in Ethics at Harvard Extension School. He is the author of Post-Truth (MIT Press, 2018), The Scientific Attitude (MIT Press, 2019), and many other books, as well as numerous popular essays that have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Scientific American, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New Statesman, and The Times Higher Education Supplement. His new book How to Talk to a Science Denier—which is based on first-hand conversations with Flat Earthers, climate deniers, and others—will be published by MIT Press this summer.
