Climate Change, Decolonization, and Ways of Seeing

Jaskiran Dhillon, Tami Navarro, and Macarena Gómez-Barris in conversation on the politics and theory of climate change. Recorded at Verso Books in Brooklyn, September 13, 2018.

Co-sponsored by Verso Books, Social Text, Science for the People, 350.org and Jacobin’s The Dig podcast.

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From Ecuador, Perú, Chile, Colombia, and Bolivia, Macarena Gómez-Barris’s book “The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives” describes “submerged perspectives,” the decolonial ways of knowing that unsettle colonial relationships to land and the forms of violence they reproduce.

“The Extractive Zone” addresses five scenes of ruinous capitalism, theorizing how we can shift our perception towards political and social potential. To extend this conversation, a group of artists-activists-scholars addresses these questions: how can artistic, filmic, activist, and experimental approaches make visible the spaces of environmental and social ruin and the lasting imprint of multiple catastrophes upon our perception of social life? What forms of writing, activity, and making art in the interstices of life/death worlds allow us to differently inhabit viewpoints beyond the extractive view?

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Jaskiran Dhillon is a first generation academic and organizer who grew up on Treaty Six Cree and Metis Territory in Saskatchewan, Canada. Committed to the tenets of public intellectualism, Jaskiran’s scholarship is intimately connected to, and informed by, on-the-ground advocacy and direct action. Her first book, “Prairie Rising: Indigenous Youth, Decolonization, and the Politics of Intervention,” provides a critical, ethnographic account of state interventions in the lives of urban Indigenous youth. Her new research focuses on developing an anti-colonial critique of the environmental justice movement by examining Indigenous political movements working against the extractive industry, including the resistance at Standing Rock. Jaskiran is an associate professor of global studies and anthropology at The New School and a member of the New York City Stands with Standing Rock Collective.

Tami Navarro is the associate director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), the founder of its Caribbean Feminisms on the Page literary series, and co-founder of the collective Critical Caribbean Feminisms (CCF), which seeks to center critical engagements with Caribbean diasporic projects. Her work has been published in Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Small Axe Salon, The Caribbean Writer, and The Global South. She is currently at work on a manuscript entitled “Virgin Capital: Financial Services as Development in the US Virgin Islands.”

Macarena Gómez-Barris is chairperson of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies and the Global South Center at Pratt Institute. She is author of “The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives,” which theorizes social life through five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories. She is also author of the “Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas,” “Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile,” and co-editor, with Herman Gray, of “Towards a Sociology of a Trace.” She is the author of numerous articles and essays in art catalogues as well as peer reviewed journals, including writing on the work of Julie Mehretu, Laura Aguilar, Carolina Caycedo, Regina José Galindo, Cecilia Vicuña, Francisco Huichaqueo, and Patricio Guzmán. Macarena was a Fulbright fellow at the Sociology and Gender Department in FLACSO Ecuador, Quito.