CARGC-CDCS Symposium - Building Logistical Solidarity: Transnational Media and Movements Against Extractivism

The fourth roundtable in the month-long CARGC-CDCS Symposium discusses media, tactics, and strategies for building a transnational movement against extractivism.

This is the fourth roundtable of the month-long CARGC-CDCS Symposium, "Building Solidarity in the Anthropocene: Approaches to Infrastructure, Environment, and Global Communication." It will consist of two parts and take place at 10:00-11:30 am ET (Part One) and 12:30-2:00 pm ET (Part Two) on April 28, 2022. The Symposium will conclude with a filmmaker discussion on Friday, April 29. In addition, each week of April, we will provide access to a different documentary film which explores relationships among technology, infrastructure, environment. Please see below for the detailed Symposium description.

Download the Symposium program

About Roundtable Four

"Building Logistical Solidarity: Transnational Media and Movements Against Extractivism"

This two-part roundtable will engage leading thinkers, artists, and activists in a joint conversation about media, tactics, and strategies for building a transnational movement against extractivism. The first part will situate these struggles within two key geographies—rare earth mineral mining in South Greenland, and lithium mining in Chile and/or Nevada—endeavoring to open dialogue across these geographies, to strengthen networks of what Thea Riofrancos calls logistical or “supply chain solidarity” that can more powerfully push back against the extractive designs of (green) capitalism. The second roundtable will build on these situated issues, broadening the discussion geographically, theoretically, and methodologically, to address key questions of power and representation in environmental art, activism, and the politics of decolonization in this perilously uneven (green) energy transition. 

Part One: 10:00-11:30 am ET

"Reimagining Extractive Futures: Dispatches from Chile, Peehee mm’huh (Thacker Pass, Nevada), and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland)"

register for Zoom webinar part one

This roundtable draws issues of environmental activism, art, media, and decolonization down into situated spaces, and attempts to open dialogue and build solidarity between these spaces. Bringing together community members, artists, and activists from three sites where extraction—in the name of green and digital futures—is actively being imposed, negotiated, and resisted, we will discuss threads of commonality between these struggles, and how these entwined threads can help build stronger networks of solidarity against the rising tide of (green) capitalism. Participants include Inuk Jorgensen, a filmmaker and activist from Narsaq in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland); Gary McKinney, a Western Shoshone-Paiute activist from Peehee mm’huh (Thacker Pass, Nevada), and Ramón Morales Balcázar, Coordinator of the Plurinational Observatory of Andean Salt Flats OPSAL and Ph.D. student in Rural Development at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. The discussion will be chaired and moderated by CARGC Fellows Zane Griffin Talley Cooper and Ingrid Burrington.

Part Two: 12:30-2:00 pm ET

"Environmental Art, Activism, and Decolonization"

register for zoom webinar part two

This roundtable will bring together three dynamic scholar-activists to discuss environmental art, media, and decolonization. Topics to be discussed will include The Red Deal, environmental artist-activists, and transnational movement-building against extractivism. Speakers include T.J. Demos (Professor and Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History and Visual Culture at University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies), Kathryn Yusoff (Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London), Melanie K. Yazzie (Assistant Professor of Native American Studies and American Studies at the University of New Mexico and Co-Founder of The Red Nation). The discussion will be moderated by Annenberg Postdoctoral Fellow Hanna E. Morris.

Panelists and Chairs

Part One

Inuk Jorgensen is a filmmaker and activist from Greenland. Inuk holds a master's degree in film studies, is a voting member of the European Film Academy, sits on the board of Film.GL, and has a long history of producing shorts and advertising content of different sorts. His short films have been shown at more than 100 film festivals worldwide and on every continent, including Antarctica, winning awards in as diverse countries as, the U.S., Finland, India, Greenland, and Ukraine.While he has won praise for his own films, he is also a keen lecturer on the subject of film production/-studies. He has been teaching film production for more than a decade and has been involved in several film workshops and festivals all around the Nordic countries helping young people learn about filmmaking. We have the honor to screen Inuk's short film In the Shadow of Tugtupite (2020) at our symposium during April 21-25.

Gary McKinney is from the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Northern Nevada/Southern Idaho. He is a Shoshone Paiute descendant of treaties between the Shoshone & Paiutes and the United States of America. Today, Gary McKinney and members of The People of Red Mountain continue the tradition of defending ancestral homelands from what is now the Thacker Pass Lithium Mining Project, located in North Nevada, Paiute territory. Mr. McKinney is a member of the American Indian Movement/Northern Nevada Chapter & a spokesman for the People of Red Mountain Committee.

Ramón Morales Balcázar is Coordinator of the Plurinational Observatory of Andean Salt Flats OPSAL, a cross-border collective that brings together indigenous leaders, activists, and researchers from Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia around the protection of these ecosystems. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Rural Development at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. In his doctoral research he seeks to account for the re-existence processes that arise in the Salar de Atacama in a context marked by the expansion of green extractivism. He coordinated the book Andean Salt Flats, an Ecology of Knowledge for the Protection of Our Salt Flats and Wetlands (threatened by extractivism) (2021) and produced the documentary Water is Worth More than Lithium (2021). In Chile, he is currently leading an initiative that seeks to lay the foundations for a regulatory framework that, through the Rights of Nature in the new constitution, effectively recognizes and protects these ecosystems and all their inhabitants.

 Zane Griffin Talley Cooper is currently a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication and a doctoral fellow at CARGC at the University of Pennsylvania. He researches the cultural and ecological politics of digital media infrastructures, and how they intersect with regimes of energy production and raw resource extraction across the Arctic. His dissertation (BIT/COIN/RARE/EARTH: Data, Energy, and Extraction across the Arctic) is a multimodal and multi-sited ethnographic study of the entangled material practices of data, energy, and extraction in and between Iceland and Greenland. His works appeared in Big Data &Society, Critical Digital Sovereignties, and art exhibitions.  

Ingrid Burrington is currently a research affiliate at CARGC. Ingrid has previously taught at Rhode Island School of Design, the Cooper Union, and the School for Poetic Computation. She writes, makes maps, and tells jokes about places, politics, and the weird feelings people have about both. Much of her work focuses on mapping, documenting, and studying the often-overlooked or occluded landscapes of the internet (and the ways in which the entire planet has become, in effect, a “landscape of the internet”). Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, Popula, e-flux journal, and other outlets. She is also the author of the book Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure (Melville House, 2016). More information about Ingrid's work can be found on her website lifewinning.com.

Part Two

T.J. Demos is an award-winning writer on contemporary art, global politics, and ecology. He is Professor and Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He researches the intersection of visual culture, radical politics, and political ecology, and is the author of numerous books, including Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (Duke, 2020); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology (Sternberg, 2016) ; and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg, 2017). He recently co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020) and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-21). Demos was recently Chair and Chief Curator of the Climate Collective, providing public programming related to the 2021 Climate Emergency > Emergence program at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Maat) in Lisbon. He is presently working on a new book on radical futurisms.

Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on geophilosophy, earth sciences and political aesthetics in the Anthropocene in conversation with black feminist theory. In 2018, she published A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, which addresses geology and the racialization of matter. Her book Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race is forthcoming.

Melanie K. Yazzie is Assistant Professor of Native American Studies and American Studies at the University of New Mexico and Co-Founder of The Red Nation. Melanie is bilagaana born for Ma’iideeshgiizhinii (Coyote Pass Clan). She specializes in Navajo/American Indian history; (neo)liberalism; settler colonialism and decolonization; biopolitics; water; Indigenous feminisms; and more. She also engages in extensive public intellectual and activist work that focuses on Native women’s rights, LGBTQ2 rights, environmental justice, policing and incarceration, Indigenous housing justice, urban Indigenous issues, and international solidarity. 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. She currently serves as the editor for the interdisciplinary international journal DIES.

Hanna E. Morris. (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is an interdisciplinary scholar of media, culture, and the climate crisis. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania where she is currently writing a book entitled Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power. Hanna’s research and writing have been published in various academic journals and popular media outlets including Environmental Communication, Politique Américaine, Media Theory, Reading the Pictures, and Earth Island Journal. She is also the co-editor of a new book entitled Climate Change and Journalism: Negotiating Rifts of Time (Routledge, 2021). Hanna’s scholarship has been recognized by the Stuart Hall Award, New Directions for Climate Communication Research Fellowship, and three Top Paper Awards from the International Communication Association and the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences.

About the Series

"Building Solidarity in the Anthropocene: Approaches to Infrastructure, Environment, and Global Communication"

Oceans rise. Trees burn. Shales fracture. Mines pollute. Viruses spread. Cities under lockdown. Infrastructures attack. Ecologies go feral…. We are in an era where infrastructures and environments are ever closely intersected on a global scale. How to make sense of the different but intersecting logics, networks, and poetics of infrastructures and environments? What critical roles do media and mediation play in shaping the anthropocene, both in the Global South and North? At the 2022 CARGC-CDCS Spring Symposium, we invite speakers to discuss how they address these important questions in their respective works.  
 
The 2022 Symposium will bring together leading scholars, artists, activists, journalists, and other experts to collaboratively envision our shared futures. Speakers will share their research and multi-modal works from wide-ranging and multidisciplinary perspectives. The main topics of discussion include resource extraction, decolonial practices, politics of environment, urban infrastructure, environmental racism, trans-oceanic supply chains, and communication infrastructures amidst global health emergencies. We envision each roundtable as a generative space for open dialogues and critical reflections. Our month-long Symposium will also feature filmmakers and their works which explore the relationships among technology, infrastructure, environment, and affected communities. Their films will be made available for online screening (access with codes) during the Symposium month. Our Symposium month will conclude with a cross-panel discussion about this year’s overarching themes and our featured films.