Recorded Friday, December 5, 2025
Since ASLE hosted its 2024 Contingent and Independent Scholar Online Speaker Series, much has changed in and outside of higher education. The climate crisis has intensified, as emerging authoritarian and far-right governments dismantle democracies, roll back environmental regulations, cut funding for research, education, and culture, and expand militarization and policing.
Such sobering circumstances make it hard to remain hopeful, but the need for resistance, resilience, and regeneration have never been higher. Many scholars working across the environmental and public humanities are searching for creative and compassionate strategies in response.
On December 5th from 2-3pm Eastern Time, ASLE will host an online roundtable to take stock of the current landscape for independent and contingent scholars, and to consider how to support each other and build solidarity networks. The discussion will focus on how current challenges impact independent and contingent scholars as contingency expands across higher education.
The event, hosted by Kate Huber, ASLE Contingent/Independent Advocacy Officer, will be in discussion format and include ample time for audience participation, ensuring we can have an open conversation and cultivate a community of learning and practice.
Our guest speakers will share how their work and approach to teaching, funding, activism, coalition building, and research have had to change with shifting political, educational, and environmental conditions. Together we will strategize ways to build solidarity and support networks. We will brainstorm, examine, discuss, and amplify a range of approaches and projects, incorporating the diverse multispecies and environmental histories and cultures that are so vital to understanding our changing world.
Registration is free but required (a Zoom link will be sent to registrants several days before the event). Sign up to participate using the button above.
Guests:
Adriana Kolijn is a PhD Candidate at the University of Ottawa in Canada. She recently submitted her thesis entitled Seeds of a Revolution: Land Reform and Literary Ecologies in Modern Latin American Literature. She has also published the article “Bananas, Deep Ecology and Neocolonialism in Viento Fuerte by Miguel Ángel Asturias” in the journal Hispania. Previously she was a member-at-large in the ASLE executive council. She is also active in the Canadian Association of Hispanists and organizing a panel for its upcoming conference in Salamanca, Spain in 2026. She is currently teaching Spanish at the University of Ottawa.
Anthony Lioi is a professor of English at the Juilliard School in New York. He is the author of Nerd Ecology (2016) and many essays on contemporary American literature and popular culture. He contributed to germinal volumes in ecocriticism, including Coming Into Contact, Artifacts & Illuminations, Early Modern Ecostudies, Ecomedia, and Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies. He has served ASLE in many capacities, including as an Executive Council member (2011-2013) and Co-President (2016-2017). He sits on the editorial board of Green Letters and serves as media review editor for Resilience: A Journal of Environmental Humanities.
Dr Kelsey McFaul is postdoctoral research fellow at University College Dublin, where she specializes in socioecological cultural analysis, postcolonial literature, and the environmental humanities, with a focus on African literatures, languages, and climates. She recently obtained her PhD in literature from UC Santa Cruz. As a public fellow at the Center for the Art of Translation and Two Lines Press, she co-edited No Edges: Swahili Stories (2023), the first collection of Swahili fiction in English translation. She served as co-chair for the 2025 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (US) biennial conference entitled “Collective Atmospheres”.
Stephen Rust is a Teaching Professor in the English Department at the University of Oregon. Stephen has been an active part of the growth of ecomedia studies as co-editor of Ecocinema Theory and Practice (2013), Ecomedia: Key Issues (2016), Ecocinema Theory and Practice 2 (2023), and The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies (2024) and founding advisory board member of Journal of Environmental Media and Media+Environment. He is a former ASLE board member, the first contingent faculty member elected to that position in 2015.
Mimi Winick, PhD, is Powell-Edwards Chair in Religion and the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her current book project on late Victorian theorists of religion and their invention of a secret history of feminist spirituality was supported by a 2023 ACLS Project Development Grant. From 2016-2024, she worked off the tenure-track at three different universities, including as a fellow in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program and on the Transcendence and Transformation initiative at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.
