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February 28, 2024

Agrotopias: Abby Goode and the Imagined Elsewheres of American Sustainability Rhetoric

McIntyre Amy

Our conversation with Professor Goode explores her recent book Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability. Two recent phrases form the impetus of her book: “We Can’t Solve the Climate Crisis Unless Black Lives Matter” and “Climate Change Is also a Racial Justice Problem”. Goode traces these back to the enigmatic Thomas Jefferson to illuminate and enmesh the supposedly protoecological American past with its racist and eugenic histories by analyzing agrotopias. She defines agrotopias as “seemingly ideal worlds of agrarian stability and productive labor” ...

DEADLINE EXTENDED! Call-For-Presentations for Northwestern University Environment, Culture, and Society Symposium

(AT)TENSION: EMBRACING INDETERMINACY THROUGH OBSERVATION, ATTUNEMENT, AND OTHER EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE-MAKING UNDER THE CLIMATE CRISIS

As the Environmental Humanities continues its solidification as a field of study and specialization, the discipline and its methodologies are at risk of reifying the violences that occur when experimental and emerging methods are codified within pre-existing institutional logics. How can the Environmental Humanities keep its nimbleness, its indeterminacy, its commitment to epistemological justice, in order to resist the pitfalls of standardization? How might scholars, artists, and practitioners escape their enfolding into ...