UCSB Talk: Anna Lappe, “Your Plate and the Planet: The Ethical Implications of our Modern Diet”

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Talk: Anna Lappe, “Your Plate and the Planet: The Ethical Implications of our Modern Diet”
Thursday, Nov. 10th 8:00
Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall
James Beard Award-winning author Anna Lappé explores the connections between what we eat and the fate of the planet: from the climate crisis to the mounting public health epidemic of chronic disease to worsening economic inequality. It’s all connected. But alongside this story of the negative impacts of our food system, Anna delivers a message of hope: All around the world, from the urban farms of Philadelphia to the organic fields of India’s Andra Pradesh, communities are showing the powerful potential of sustainable fair food systems and charting a path to this more ethical way of eating.
Anna Lappé is an internationally recognized expert on food systems and the national bestselling author of Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It. She is a recipient of the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award and a TIME magazine Eco Who’s Who. In 2011, Anna founded Real Food Media, Which works with grassroots partners nationwide to catalyze creative storytelling about food, farming, and sustainability. With her mother, Frances Moore Lappé, she is also the co-founder of the Small Planet Institute and Small Planet Fund, which has raised and given away more than $1 million since it was founded a decade ago. Anna works with other philanthropists to foster food system change and leads The Panta Rhea Foundation Food Program.

 

 

Literature & Environment Film Series, “Eco-Horror and the Revenge of Nature” on Nov. 30th

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Film Screening: Barry Levinson’s “The Bay” (2012)
Wednesday, Nov. 30th from 6:00-9:00
South Hall 2635
The Literature & Environment Initiative will be hosting a year-long series on Eco-Horror during 2016-17.

In Bruno Latour’s words, people are ill equipped emotionally and mentally to deal with the scale of environmentally destructive events in the Anthropocene. Eco-horror has historically grappled with the terrors of scale, from a classic concern with mutant creatures who teach humanity a lesson about tampering with nature to the contemporary fascination with and dread of nature as an all pervasive, inescapable force that reworks the human body and mind now that we have changed everything by geo-engineering and recomposing the material world from the level of the molecule to the atmosphere.

In an age of supposed technological mastery over nature, an epoch during which humans supposedly exert a total global reach over nature (a feat desired at least since the Enlightenment), how does Eco-Horror capture the way Western culture psychologically processes the “pushing back” of materiality, the sensation of “nature biting back” as mass species extinctions, global climate change, etc.? Eco-horror represents this recalcitrant materiality as collective anxiety and desire. The genre figures our unconscious knowledge that the feeling of domination civilization has given us is a delusion: “Behind our need for mastery lies our fear and trembling in the face of the awesome power of mother nature” (Joseph Dodds) and our secret “hope that she will [n]ever be entirely subdued to man” (Freud).

Eco-Horror rehearses the communal desire to dominate a feminized nature in order to assert our human subjectivity and rationality. On the other hand, the genre expresses an underlying masochistic impulse to relinquish our autonomy by dissolving in nature’s power and dwelling in the wilds of the leaky id by deploying perceptual (affective) and aesthetic technologies that undo gender, race, and species. As a part of this series, we will consider whether Eco-Horror’s transmission of affect contributes to more destruction, violence, and political apathy? How does the genre update the trope of the feminized nature from early colonial narratives to a newly reanimated corpse-mother aesthetic that represents our collective fear of and desire for this new cyborg-like nature? The goal of the series is to explore how contemporary Eco-Horror cinema rehearses the gender/race/species politics as an incongruity between a faith in human evolution and a fearful sense of wish fulfillment regarding the possibility of human degeneration, thereby bringing to crisis the unconscious guilt and hope that the social and environmental damage is reversible.

 

 

Literature & Environment Film Series, “Eco-Horror and the Revenge of Nature” on Nov. 9th

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Film Screening: Bong Joon-ho’s “The Host” (2007)
Wednesday, Nov. 9th from 6:00-9:00
South Hall 2607
The Literature & Environment Initiative will be hosting a year-long series on Eco-Horror during 2016-17.

In Bruno Latour’s words, people are ill equipped emotionally and mentally to deal with the scale of environmentally destructive events in the Anthropocene. Eco-horror has historically grappled with the terrors of scale, from a classic concern with mutant creatures who teach humanity a lesson about tampering with nature to the contemporary fascination with and dread of nature as an all pervasive, inescapable force that reworks the human body and mind now that we have changed everything by geo-engineering and recomposing the material world from the level of the molecule to the atmosphere.

In an age of supposed technological mastery over nature, an epoch during which humans supposedly exert a total global reach over nature (a feat desired at least since the Enlightenment), how does Eco-Horror capture the way Western culture psychologically processes the “pushing back” of materiality, the sensation of “nature biting back” as mass species extinctions, global climate change, etc.? Eco-horror represents this recalcitrant materiality as collective anxiety and desire. The genre figures our unconscious knowledge that the feeling of domination civilization has given us is a delusion: “Behind our need for mastery lies our fear and trembling in the face of the awesome power of mother nature” (Joseph Dodds) and our secret “hope that she will [n]ever be entirely subdued to man” (Freud).

Eco-Horror rehearses the communal desire to dominate a feminized nature in order to assert our human subjectivity and rationality. On the other hand, the genre expresses an underlying masochistic impulse to relinquish our autonomy by dissolving in nature’s power and dwelling in the wilds of the leaky id by deploying perceptual (affective) and aesthetic technologies that undo gender, race, and species. As a part of this series, we will consider whether Eco-Horror’s transmission of affect contributes to more destruction, violence, and political apathy? How does the genre update the trope of the feminized nature from early colonial narratives to a newly reanimated corpse-mother aesthetic that represents our collective fear of and desire for this new cyborg-like nature? The goal of the series is to explore how contemporary Eco-Horror cinema rehearses the gender/race/species politics as an incongruity between a faith in human evolution and a fearful sense of wish fulfillment regarding the possibility of human degeneration, thereby bringing to crisis the unconscious guilt and hope that the social and environmental damage is reversible.

 

 

COMMA film series “Modernist Energies” hosts screening of Vertov’s “Enthusiasm” on Oct. 28

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COMMA will be hosting the first event in its 2016-17 series, “Modernist Energies.” On Friday, Oct. 28th at 12:00 in SH 2635 they will screen Dziga Vertov’s 1931 film, Enthusiasm. Vertov’s first sound film tracks the efforts of Ukrainian miners in the Donbass coal mines to fulfill their part of the first five-year plan in only four years. Following the screening, there will be a discussion of the film and two essays by Jonathan Beller and Sergei Tret’iakov. Pizza and drinks will be provided!

 

 

UCSB Talk: Bernard Stiegler Lecture: “What is ‘Modern Technics’?”

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Bernard Stiegler Lecture: “What is ‘Modern Technics’?”

 

 

Power Dynamics Flyer


Conference: Power Dynamics: Media and the Environment
Friday, April 29 / 11 AM
Saturday, April 30 / 11 AM
Loma Pelona Center

 

 

CFP -- draft 2 --April 18, 2016


Performing Climate Futures: An invitation to UCSB students to participate in the creative art of speaking about just climate futures.

If you are interested, please send a title and paragraph description of your talk to Professor John Foran at foran@soc.ucsb.edu by Friday, May 6.

 

 

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Spring 2016 Climate Futures film series.

4/21, 5/5, 5/19, 6/2
6:00 – 8:30 PM
South Hall 2617