UC Speculative Futures Collective: Racial Ecologies Panel

Part of the UC Speculative Futures Collective's Speculative Futures of Ecologies and Climate Change Symposium:

Speculative Futures: Racial Ecologies panel discussion

Dr. Kim Hester Williams (Sonoma State University), Dr. Julie Sze (UC Davis), Dr. Bt Werner (UCSD), moderated by Dr. Curtis Marez.

Kim D. Hester Williams is a professor of English and American Multicultural Studies at Sonoma State University. She is co-editor, with Leilani Nishime, of Racial Ecologies, an award-winning collection of essays on the intersectionality of race, gender, and environmental crises. In this book’s Part 5, “Speculative Futures,” she contributed an essay entitled “Earthseeds of Change: Postapocalyptic Mythmaking, Race, and Ecology in The Book of Eli and Octavia E. Butler’s Womanist Parables.” Hester Williams has also published essays concerning racialization and economy in media, popular culture, and film. She currently serves as a consultant for Legacy, a journal focused on women’s literature and criticism. Her current scholarship and writing is focused on Afro/Black eco-poetics and the continuity of artistic #blacklivesmatter in(ter)ventions in the African American vernacular tradition.

Julie Sze is a Professor of American Studies at UC Davis. She is also the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project for UC Davis’ John Muir Institute for the Environment, and in that capacity is the Faculty Advisor for 25 Stories from the Central Valley. Sze's research investigates environmental justice and environmental inequality; culture and environment; race, gender and power; and urban/community health and activism and has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the American Studies Association, and the UC Humanities Research Institute. Sze’s book, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice, won the 2008 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, awarded annually to the best published book in American Studies. Her second book is called Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis (2015). Sze has been interviewed widely in print and on the radio. Her most recent book Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger was published this month in the University of California Press American Studies Now! Series.

bt werner is a queer activist and physicist subversively embedded in the academic industrial complex.

From California’s Central Valley and a product of the UC system, Curtis Marez is Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. He is the author of Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics (2004), Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance (2016), and University Babylon: Film and Race Politics on Campus (2019). Marez is the former editor of American Quarterly and past-President of the American Studies Association. He currently co-edits, with Lisa Duggan, the American Studies Now! book series, and serves on the Advisory Board for the Environmental Communication, Culture, and Power book series, both published by the University of California Press. For more information, please visit specfutures.org.

Видео UC Speculative Futures Collective: Racial Ecologies Panel канала Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination