Chronic Catastrophes and Precious Species
Description
How must we re-imagine justice for the more-than-human world in the face of planetary catastrophe? We begin with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s principle for abolitionist praxis, “where life is precious, life is precious,” which commits to remaking worlds by reducing harm and investing in care. The ongoing climate crisis pushes this further, reinforcing a horizon of extinction that reorients the relationships between other-than-human and human lives and demands more radical conceptions of our collective world(s). A. Naomi Paik, for instance, develops the idea of “abolitionist sanctuary” out of the movement for immigrant rights. This concept would “make the whole world a sanctuary for all, everywhere,” especially the lives “we don't ordinarily see our connections to” like those of other species and the environment itself (Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary).
Yet, in broadening how we understand multiple and intersecting “chronic catastrophes” of the present, we also confront whose life counts as precious. As scholars in gender studies, critical race studies, decolonial feminism, multispecies studies, environmental justice, etc. have long argued, racialized and gendered conceptions of the “human” undermine projects for justice and forming solidarities across species. Alternatively, Juno Salazar Parreñas asks in Decolonizing Extinction, “What if we experienced this present era of extinction without violent domination and colonization over others, particularly nonhuman beings?” She goes on to argue that confronting the shared horizon of extinction means embracing risk and unequal vulnerability across species and recalibrating care against the reality of hospice. Along these lines, this seminar broadens how we imagine precious species in order to confront chronic catastrophes across the more-than-human world.
We ask: What does it mean to live justly at the end of the world(s)? What conventions of theory and representation must be revisited within the horizon of extinction? How must justice be reconceived for the more-than-human world? How do we build worlds that take seriously “where life is precious, life is precious”?
Multiple and diverse avenues of inquiry are desired. Possible directions may include but are not limited to: anticarceral activism, environmental justice, critical refugee studies, liberation pedagogy, black radical thought, feminist and queer carework, multispecies relatedness, ecocriticism, black ecologies, indigenous resistance movements, climate grief or solastalgia, protest rhetoric, and coalitional politics.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Jennie Snow is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Writing Studies at Montclair State University. She holds a PhD from Brown University and her research focuses on the intersections of military, humanitarian, and carceral power in multiethnic American literature. Her current project examines the deployment of the prison camp by the U.S. in the 20th and 21st century, which becomes the site for alternative political formations that estrange from state-based forms of citizenship.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Moira Marquis has published research in Science Fiction Studies, Resilience, Green Letters and other journals. Her most recent article "Reading Wounds in Women's Prison Writing" is in The Cambridge Companion to American Prison Writing. Her current book project, Thought Threats: Carceral Censorship in America, is forthcoming from UNC Press.
Speaker Bio
Jane Robbins Mize is an Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A scholar of North American literature and the environment, her research focuses on settler industrialization, human–environment relations, and the carceral state. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Environmental Humanities, American Literary Realism, Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities, and the edited collection Hurston in Context.
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Speaker Bio
Ayla McCullough is a Ph.D. candidate in Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University and will graduate May 2026. Her dissertation "Decolonizing Kinship: Orphan Livability and Hospice Ecologies" denaturalizes kinship as a "developmental essentialism" in the Global North by foregrounding children and animals in the Global South who challenge normative conceptions of life and livability. Her next project expands on these ideas with an ethnographic study of the Monterey Bay.
Speaker Bio
Isabel Lane is a lecturer in the Harvard College Writing Program and previously held
positions as Program Director for the Boston College Prison Education Program and as Visiting
Researcher at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. Her work has appeared in Slavic
Literatures and Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities, and she is the co-author of Evacuation Plan (Vera Institute, 2024), a comic about prisons and environmental justice.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Tristan Call is an anthropologist and organizer specializing in migrant labor and the history and social movements of Mesoamerica and the Southern US. He currently works as a tenant union organizer in rural Tennessee.
Speaker Bio
Chiara Benetollo is the Executive Director of the Puttkammer Center for Educational Justice. Her research explores the simultaneous creation of model bodies and collective identities through rhetoric and narrative, and her articles have appeared in numerous Italian, Russian, and American publications, including Cases of Academic Redesign for Greater Social Justice, Diacritica, and Modern Language Notes.
Speaker Bio
Alexia Bozas is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature and Visual Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Her scholarship is grounded in an interdisciplinary South-South decolonial framework and examines how contemporary Latin American and Middle Eastern literature and film depict global extractivist violence and its entanglement within broader systems of imperial power. She is interested in tracing representations of human-soil relationships and microbial lifeworlds in speculative fiction.