Thinking Place
Description
Thinking Place
This seminar focuses on questions of place in relation to process, method, and field-form for environmental humanities. What does it mean to think in place, or to write from place, at a moment when the pressures of the planetary and the collapse of worlds and world orders make themselves felt in uneven ways?
Attention to place and/or place-based work has become increasingly prominent in the environmental humanities, indebted to work in feminist science studies (Haraway 1988, Tsing 2005) and anti-colonial scholarship and praxis that calls on research to be accountable to Land, community, and history (Watts 2013; Liboiron 2021; Kanngeiser & Todd 2020). Yet, it is often taken up without the methodological inheritances and histories found in anthropological or scientific field research. This seminar asks: what collective, creative, and undisciplined practices are orienting our encounters and engagements with place?
This seminar will build upon conversations, collaborations, and compositions begun during Fogo Collaborative Inquiry (FoCI), a two-week writing residency on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, in May 2025. Participants at FoCI considered the question how to live? and the possibility of forging new and durable imaginaries as we confronted the inadequacy of extant cultural narratives. We grappled with what it meant to ask these questions from Fogo Island, with how best to engage with place in all of its complexity, and what forms of writing or practice could best convey the experience: the almanac? the lexicon? the field note? the guest book?
We seek to extend and expand this conversation, welcoming both previous FoCI participants and new members to think place together in Montreal.
We welcome contributions that consider question such as:
- Place as field of study: how has the “normative impulse to particularize theory in relation to animate ecologies” (Diamanti 2024) shaped environmental humanities in recent years?
- Place as occasion: what practices–research-based, collaborative, material, communal or creative–emerge from situated inquiry? What knowledge does place make possible and what might place obscure?
- Place as politics: if “justice is a place” (Gilmore, 2023), what is the role or work of place in meeting the political demands of our historical conjuncture?
- Place as constructed: how do we understand and relate to place not as given, but as it is shaped through displacement, mediation, and uneven forms of access? How might place-based work be a form of or resistance to “immediacy culture” (Kornbluth, 2023)?
- Place as precarious: how does engagement with place respond to the accelerating instability of places in the context of solastalgia and other forms of [climate driven] change?
- Place as narrative: how do places give rise to narratives and how might narratives attempt to fix place? How should we understand the formation and circulation of narrative in relation to place?
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Barbara Leckie is a professor in the Department of English and the Institute for the Comparative Study of Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa. She is the author of Climate Change, Interrupted: Representation and the Remaking of Time (Stanford UP, 2022), among other books, and the Academic Director of Re.Climate: Centre for Climate Communication and Public Engagement, a national group focused on climate communication and engagement.
Speaker Bio
Caleb Wellum is a historian of energy, culture, and political economy in the twentieth century US. He is currently a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability at the University of Toronto Scarborough and author of Energizing Neoliberalism: The 1970s Energy Crisis and the Making of Modern America (John Hopkins UP, 2023). His work also appears in Cultural Studies, Modern American History, Environmental History, and Enterprise and Society.
Speaker Bio
Mark Simpson (English and Film Studies, University of Alberta) investigates energy cultures and the politics of mobility. He is a core member of the Petrocultures Research Group and a co-founder of the After Oil Collective. Recent publications include the collaborative theor-poetical manifesto Energy Emergency Repair Kit (Fordham 2024) as well as essays on energy impasse, energy futurity, plasticity, infrastructural life, and feral cosmopolitics.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Hannah Tollefson is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. She studies how infrastructures of energy and logistics mediate climatic and capitalist crises, shaping the possibilities and limits of transition. Her work engages debates about technological change, environmental politics, and critiques of capital under conditions of economic and ecological collapse.
Speaker Bio
Darin Barney is Professor and Grierson Chair in Communication Studies at McGill University. He studies infrastructure, energy and politics. He is a member of the steering committee of the Petrocultures Research Group, a founding member of the After Oil Collective, and a member of the McGill Energy Centre. His article "Sensing Churchill" appeared in the Journal of Environmental Media in 2024. Most recently, he is co-editor (with Patrick Brodie) of the volume Media Rurality (Duke UP 2026).
Speaker Bio
Crystal Bartolovich is Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University, where she teaches courses in Marxism, Critical Theory, Utopianism, and early modern studies.
Speaker Bio
Sarah MacDonell is a PhD student in Communications at McGill University. Her work considers the aesthetic and affective legacy of abandoned coal mines in Cape Breton. A recent summary of her work can be found in Heliotrope Environmental Media Journal, https://www.heliotropejournal.net/helio/infrastructuralruin.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Dr. Saskia Cornes is an assistant professor of the practice at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, and the Director of the Duke Campus Farm.
Speaker Bio
Anna Hill (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Literature and Environment at Clemson University. Her research and teaching focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone literatures, with a particular emphasis on literature of the United States, environmental criticism, memory studies, and postcolonial/decolonial studies. From 2023-2025, she was a Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University. She received her Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 2022.
Speaker Bio
Laura Pannekoek is a PhD candidate at Concordia. Her dissertation, At the Survey Frontier: Geology, Technology, and the Settler State, is a media history of geological surveying in Canada. Her work appears in Canadian Journal of Film Studies and Museum & Society, as well as Heliotrope, The Dutch Review of Books, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature (University of Amsterdam) and is member of Grierson Research Group and the Feminist Media Studio.