Dear Colleagues,
The sequel to Climate Futures 1: Design and the Just Transition
<https://livestream.com/RISD/climate-futures-design-symposium-day-one> which
we held at RISD last November is upon us! Climate Futures II - Design
Politics, Design Natures, Aesthetics and the Green New Deal is a
collaboration between The Graduate Program in Nature-Culture-Sustainability
Studies <https://liberalartsmasters.risd.edu/ncss/courses/> at RISD, The
Graduate Program in Global Arts and Culture
<https://liberalartsmasters.risd.edu/gac/> and The Institute at Brown for
Environment & Society. This year's symposium will draw together colleagues
to discuss racial capitalism, decoloniality and environmentally just energy
transitions, the future of the architectures in carbon constrained worlds,
cyborg ecology & design justice, the aesthetic of the just transition and
an inventive politics for a Green New Deal. Full text and details are below
and tickets available here. Feel free to attend and circulate details of
our symposium through your networks.
Thanks,
Damian White
Dean of Liberal Arts and Professor of Social Theory and Environmental
Studies;
Rhode Island School of Design
2 College Street, Providence, RI 02903 USA
*he/him/his*
New Book!!!!! Environments, Natures and Social Theory: Towards a Critical
Hybridity
<http://www.amazon.com/Environments-Natures-Social-Theory-Hybridity/dp/0230241042/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1441997278&sr=1-1&keywords=damian+white>
New Article:
https://www.academia.edu/38329433/Just_Transitions_Transition_Design_-_Preliminary_Notes_on_a_Design_Politics_for_a_Green_New_Deal
The Graduate Program in Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies
<https://liberalartsmasters.risd.edu/ncss/courses/> at RISD, The Graduate
Program in Global Arts and Culture
<https://liberalartsmasters.risd.edu/gac/> and The Institute at Brown for
Environment & Society presents:
*Climate Futures II: Design Politics, Design Natures, Aesthetics and the
Green New Deal Thursday Dec 5th 2019 Location: Metcalf Auditorium, Chace
Center/RISD Museum *The Rhode Island School of Design
<[log in to unmask],-71.4222334,15z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m9!4m8!1m1!4e1!1m5!1m1!1s0x89e445164b5ec617:0x49112556d05817bc!2m2!1d-71.4078391!2d41.8262164" target="_blank">https://www.google.com/maps/dir/41.8299904,[log in to unmask],-71.4222334,15z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m9!4m8!1m1!4e1!1m5!1m1!1s0x89e445164b5ec617:0x49112556d05817bc!2m2!1d-71.4078391!2d41.8262164>.
Tickets available here
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/climate-futures-ii-design-politics-aesthetics-the-green-new-deal-tickets-74484064843
Over the last two years the Green New Deal has come to define how we might
think about just post-carbon transition in the United States. Whilst
denounced by some conservatives and liberal ecomodernists as implausible
and dismissed by assorted climate doomsters as too little, too late, it
still stands as the only game in town for thinking about post-carbon
futures. This symposium seeks to shine a constructive, yet critical, light
on not only the potentialities but also the limitations of the Green New
Deal as a political, design, cultural, technological and aesthetic
discourse and praxis.
The Green New Deal has generated a rich series of policy debates about the
ways in which just transitions could be stimulated and enacted. It has
served as a reminder of the many admirable ways in which the old New Deal
defined a vision of public works and public design, infrastructure and
planning for the public good. However - and as many Green New Dealers are
well aware - the original New Deal was also marked by multiple exclusions
and a complicated racial, gender and labor politics. It worked with a
political imaginary largely bounded by the US nation state. Its more
radical ambitions were ultimately constrained and contained. A Green New
Deal will have to mobilize against fossil capitalism, coloniality and an
emboldened White supremacy in very different ways to the old New Deal. It
will have to address a global climate emergency that will require building
new forms of solidarity across borders and boundaries. It will also have to
open up discussions about the socio-technical and political design pathways
to post-carbon futures in ways that might force us to move beyond the
aesthetic and design horizons of “small is beautiful” era environmentalisms
without tumbling back into a paternalistic liberalism.
If the policy context that could inform a Green New Deal is slowly coming
into view, the cultural, aesthetic, socio-technological or design politics
that could further support and radicalize a new Green New Deal is less in
evidence. This could stand as a significant limitation to further progress
given that we know that just transitions to post-carbon futures are not
going to emerge though legislation alone nor will they be built through
fear of extinction or declarations of the need for eco-austerity. Diverse
publics will have to be mobilized at affective, cultural and political
levels. A sense of political and creative agency, desire and perhaps even
joy in the opportunities that exist for democratically designing and
redesigning our worlds will all be vital for enacting just post-carbon
futures. The just transition, understood as the Green New Deal or
otherwise, will have to be imagined and built, fabricated and realized,
coded and created. Politicized processes of making, of prefiguring, that
occur again and again and again are going to be constitutive features of
the attempt to build survivable futures on a rapidly warming planet. New
forms of art and cultural production, new modes of solidarity and care, a
new design politics residing in new public institutions residing in many
democratic spaces will be required to disarm the fatalists and the
fanatics. This symposium seeks to consider how a Green New Deal might help
us face down the climate doomsters and denialists, think beyond technocrats
and technophobes and build creative political ecologies for the future.
Coffee 8.30am-9am
Introductions 9.00am-9.20am
9.00am-9.05am “Welcome to the Symposium/Welcome to
Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies at RISD” Jonathan Highfield GPD
Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies at RISD.
9.05am-9.15am. “Climate Futures, Design Politics and the Green New Deal:
Some Introductions” Damian White, Dean of Liberal Arts, RISD.
9.15am-10.30am
1. Architectural futures, public infrastructure+ the Green New Deal
The architectures have, to date, been somewhat inconsistent champions of
just transitions for low carbon futures. Sustainable design, with its
rather one-sided focus on deriving “lessons from nature”, has historically
displayed limited interest in class, race, labor, gender, or broader power
relations. Design schools and design professionals have regularly
proclaimed that they can play a leadership role in building low carbon
futures but then continually returned to “business as usual agendas”. The
call for a Green New Deal, though, has raised hopes that more radicalized
visions of architecture, landscape architecture and interior architecture
could be renewed, revitalized and reworked in more sophisticated ways. In
this panel we will consider the extent to which new forms of public works
for the public good in sustainable urbanism, green infrastructure and
adaptive reuse could push back against green gentrification and green
neo-liberalism. We will explore the ways in which labor struggles for just
working conditions within architecture and design could ally and reinforce
the call for a Green New Deal. We consider how architectural innovations
with virtual reality could open up community engagements with sea level
rise. Finally, we struggle with the extent to which the national imaginary
of a Green New Deal can address the profound cross-border impacts and
global design challenges posed by climate change.
Chair: Ijlal Muzaffar (RISD THAD/Global Arts and Culture Graduate Program
Director)
• Billy Fleming (Ian L. McHarg Center, UPenn). “Landscape Architecture and
the Green New Deal.”
• Peggy Deamer (Yale/The Architecture Lobby); “Labor, Architecture and the
Green New Deal.”
• Daniel Barber (Architecture, UPenn). “After Comfort.”
• Liliane Wong (Interior Architecture, RISD) “INTAR, VR and Rising Sea
levels.”
Discussant Amy Kulper (Architecture, RISD).
Sponsored by the Division of Liberal Arts
10.30am-10.45am Coffee
10.45am-11.50am
2. Dialogue Session: Racial Capitalism, designs for energy transition and
the Green New Deal
Industrialized energy has long been predicated on a system of racial
capitalism and colonialism. We rely on electricity, heat, and fuels that
derive value through the historical and ongoing displacement and
exploitation of indigenous, black, and Latinx land, labor and life. The
Green New Deal could offer an opportunity to not only overhaul this
existing fossil fuel infrastructure but also redress the racial capitalism
on which it is built. In this dialogue, we will explore some of the
tensions that currently exist between the urgent need to move as fast as
possible to implement a clean energy transition and concerns that, if this
transition is not done right, it could recreate new environmental
injustices and new sacrifice zones. We will consider the ways in which
environmental justice movements are productively contributing to new
decolonial visions of energy transition. Finally, we will explore the
opportunities that exist for confronting and dismantling racial capitalism
through a Green New Deal framework, focusing on policies, strategies, and
overarching principles.
Chair: Lauren Richter (HPSS/NCSS RISD)
Discussants: Myles Lennon (Anthropology, Brown), Shalanda H.Baker (Law,
Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University) and Jacqui
Patterson, (Director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice
Program).
Sponsored by RISD’s Office of Social Equity and Inclusion
11.50am-12.00am Break
12.00am-1.10pm
3: Liberatory ecotechnologies, cyborg ecologies and the Green New Deal
In the 1960s, Murray Bookchin argued that a post-capitalist ecological
society would have to incorporate automation plus liberatory
eco-technologies to provide the infrastructure of a new ecological society.
Eco-design and eco-technology running alongside much broader forms of
social change could not only reawaken humanity’s sense of dependence on the
environment but restore selfhood and competence to a “client citizenry.”
Contemporary debates on the socio-technical infrastructure that could
underpin survivable futures have become increasingly anxious, ill-tempered
and polemical. Whether we consider debates around 100% renewables or 100%
clean, lab meat or the future of agriculture, either/or logics would seem
to run through the ever sharper exchanges between de-growthers and
ecomodernists. A worsening climate crisis is clearly exacerbating the
stakes of the discussion and acting as a ratchet forcing reframings of our
understanding of acceptable and unacceptable technologies. In this session
we explore what exactly it might mean to advocate for liberatory
technologies, design justice and a progressive technological politics in an
age of climate chaos and cyborg ecologies.
• Kai Bosworth (School of World Affairs, VCU) “Out of the woods: liberatory
technologies revisited”.
• Sasha Costanza-Chock (Civic Media, MIT) “Design Justice for the Green New
Deal.”
• Holly Jean Buck (Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, UCLA)
“Why we need to think in progressive utopian ways about carbon removal
technologies.”
• Sophie Lewis “Aminotechnics.”
1.10pm-2.20pm :LUNCH
2.20pm- 3.30pm
4: Liberatory aesthetics for a just transition?
Building survivable futures on a warming planet is not simply going to
involve policy for a Green New Deal. Just transitions to post-carbon just
futures are inevitably going to raise very significant aesthetic, political
and cultural issues about the worlds that we are leaving behind and the
world that we need to design and make. The Green New Deal or the just
transition more broadly has developed little in the way of a new aesthetic
or cultural politics. Its primary co-ordinates have been to look back to
the political and public aesthetics that emerged around the first New Deal
of the 1930s or turn to the aesthetic that emerged out of predominantly
white US environmentalisms of the 1970s. Do we need to find other ways to
“stay with the trouble” to paraphrase Donna Haraway as we try and construct
survivable futures? What might a joyful, aesthetics of a just transition
look like that can come to terms with the loss of certain kinds of
nature-cultures, modes of valuing and modes of making and be open to the
challenge of designing new cosmopolitan nature-cultures, new ways of
valuing and new modes of future making? Can we envisage an aesthetic and
cultural politics that reclaims low carbon pleasures present in everyday
life? Does a progressive cultural politics for a just transition require a
broader decentering of Eurocentric or US centric environmental aesthetics
and a more sustained engagement with the insights of decolonial, Latinx,
post humanist, cosmopolitical and other currents? In this panel we ponder
the kinds of liberatory aesthetics and cultural politics that could
underpin the just transition and offer solidarity and hope across borders
and boundaries.
Chair: Paula Gaetano Adi (RISD, Experimental and Foundation Studies)
• Yuriko Saito (Nature, Culture, Sustainability Studies/HPSS RISD)
“Environmental Aesthetics and Everyday Life."
• Anathastia Raina (Graphic Design, RISD) “Cyborg Ecology for the Green New
Deal.”
• Priscilla Ybarra (English, University of North Texas) “Latinx
Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial.”
Discussant: Nicholas Pevzner (Landscape Architecture, U,Penn).
Sponsored by RISD’s Experimental and Foundation Studies and RISD Graduate
Program in Global Arts and Culture
3.30pm -3.45pm Coffee
3.45pm –5pm
5. Thinking beyond the ecology of panic: The political opportunity of the
Green New Deal.
The prospect that climate conditions may have reached a point of no return
has now become a reoccurring motif of assorted climate doomsters who seem
to delight in telling working and marginalized people that “their goose is
cooked.” This is a politics that the Green New Deal clearly has to face
down. An ecology of panic at best is going to feed “passive nihilism”
(Connolly, 2016) and “melancholic paralysis” (Wark, 2015) but in addition
it could feed the rise of eco-fascism and eco-apartheid. In this concluding
session, we consider the extent to which a politics of a Green New Deal
framed around the need for environmentally just investment and
infrastructure, a fundamental reworking of class, race and gender
relations, new modes of democratic planning and approaches to global
politics focused on a new internationalism and solidarity across borders
could open up very different paths.
Timmons Roberts Chair (Brown)
• Alyssa Battistoni (Harvard College) “Cyborg Ecosocialism + Gendered
Labor + the Green New Deal.”
• Kian Goh (Urban Planning, UCLA) “Urban Planning + Design for a Green New
Deal.”
• Dan Traficonte (Urban Studies + Planning, MIT) “An Innovation Policy for
the Green New Deal.”
• Thea Riofrancos (Political Science, Providence College) “A Globally Just
Green New Deal”.
Discussant: Camilo Viveiros, George Wiley Center
Sponsored by The William R. Rhodes Center for International Economics and
Finance, Brown University and The Institute at Brown for Environment and
Society
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