On A (Not-So) Global Scale: Dissecting the Spatio-Temporal Complexities of Slow Violence
Description
Rob Nixon describes, ‘slow violence’, as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space”, one “that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (2). This seminal work raised the critical question of the strategic difficulties of representing the impact of such violence, especially as it crossed national, ethnic, cultural, linguistic and even gendered borders.
The slow violence inscribed onto these ecosystems (or bodies) is often framed as having “causes” and “fallouts”. The local ramifications of a hurricane, for example, may haunt a community for decades while the global narrative is retold in sensationalized facsimiles of the lived experience. The scalar complexities of understanding ‘disasters’, force us to confront the rhetorical, structural, symbolic and semantic limitations of conceptualizing ecological relationalities through the binary categorizations of the local and the global. Our constructed narratives of difference and demarcation obfuscate the connectedness that sustain our very existence, hindering us from fostering transformative ties.
We are interested in exploring the possibilities of comparative analytical frameworks afforded by different literary forms and cultural narratives to anticipate the scope and scale of contemporary and historical environmental concerns. Where does the “local incidence” vs “global phenomena” divide start breaking down and blurring? This panel welcomes a multiplicity of methodologies for making visible the entrenched, inscribed, and/or material consequences slow violence has on the ecosystem and body. For example, how can we negotiate the visibility of bodies that are at the frontline of impact? How can indigenous communities center their epistemology and embodied experiences in ways that build on cross—cultural solidarity? In what ways can Eurowestern systems of knowledge-making be challenged as well as be utilized to supplement alternative forms of knowledge? How can translation, as a linguistic maneuver increase access to larger and diverse audiences without privileging one language over another?
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Asmita Saha ([email protected]) and Jordan Grunawalt ([email protected]).
Topics may also include:
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Representations of space and time through cultural narratives
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Reorientation of human relationships with land and water post-natural disasters
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Role of language in infrastructural representation
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Archival methods of (Re)Telling and Relaying communal narratives
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Affordances and limitations of socio-political structures such as nation-states, territories, colonies etc.
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Reconceptualization of the ‘body’
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Planetary networks and their affiliations
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Sheetala Bhat is an assistant professor at York University's Department of English. She specializes in South Asian theatre and politics, South Asian diasporic theatre in Canada, and Indigenous theatre in Canada. She is currently working on a SSHRC-funded project on the interconnections between settler colonialism and performances of Hindu nationalism in Canada.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Isa Murdock-Hinrichs is a Professor of Practice at Tulane University. Her work explores cinema’s intersection with other arts, with particular interest in theories and representations of environment, space, narration, and early scientific theories. She has published articles on Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Michael Haneke, G.W. Sebald, and the silent works of Fritz Lang and Andre Dupont. She is currently working on a monograph on early cinematic expressions and reconfigurations of the foreign.
Speaker Bio
Junhong (Summer) Ma is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Alberta. Her dissertation, Behind the Stage of Contemporary Chinese Tea Culture, explores how tea functions as both heritage and enterprise across China and the diaspora. Based on multi-sited fieldwork in Fujian, Taiwan, and Canada, her research focuses on gender, labor, and consumption in tea art and bubble tea.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Asmita Saha is a 4th-year PhD Student in Literary and Cultural Studies at Illinois State University. Her research interests center spatial and aesthetic mapping of precarious and vulnerable spaces in postcolonial scenarios. Her work brings into conversation critical cultural studies, postcolonial studies, spatial theory and environmental humanities, with the attempt to trace and unravel the resonance of colonial and imperial history that emerges in place-oriented research and history.
Speaker Bio
Janell Tryon is a doctoral candidate in English specializing in American Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her MPH from UC Berkeley and continues to contribute to public health research initiatives. Her current book project was supported by a 2023-2024 Mellon Sawyer Dissertation Fellowship. Her interdisciplinary scholarship has been published in American Quarterly, American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, and elsewhere.
Speaker Bio
Cyraina Johnson-Roullier is Associate Professor of Modern Literature and Literature of the Americas, Concurrent Professor of Gender Studies, American Studies and Romance Literatures (French), an affiliate of the Initiative on Race and Resilience at the University of Notre Dame, and a former Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. She is the author of Reading on the Edge: Exiles, Modernities and Cultural Transformation in Proust, Joyce and Baldwin (SUNY, 2000).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Aaron Ambroso is a PhD student in Art History at Western University, and received his MA in Art History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His interests include museums and the Anthropocene; institutional critique; energy humanities; multi-species ethnography; and feminist science and technology studies. He was an Interpretive Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and is the co-founder of the Houston Climate Justice Museum. His writing has appeared in Artnet Magazine.
Speaker Bio
Jordan Grunawalt is a 4th-year PhD student in Literary and Cultural Studies at Illinois State University. Her research interests specialize in disability studies, environmental disasters, and Asian spaces. Recently, she presented on the disabling impact of the 2011 Fukushima Disaster 2025 ASLE conference.
Speaker Bio
Peter Baker is a Senior Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Stirling. He has worked on Indigenous political and cultural movements from the Andes, including a monograph which is in process on Indianism-Katarism in Bolivia. His current AHRC-funded project is on the Kichwa film of Alberto Muenala and RUPAI in Ecuador. He also is working on experimental contemporary writing praxes, including a project on transautography with Dr Maddalena Cerrato.