What does it mean to have an ecological mind? - Highlights - PAOLA SPINOZZI

What does it mean to have an ecological mind? - Highlights - PAOLA SPINOZZI

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Coordinator, Phd Programme, Environmental Sustainability & Wellbeing · University of Ferrara
Co-editor of Cultures of Sustainability and Wellbeing: Theories, Histories and Policies

The humanities are all about representing the world, while the sciences are all about knowing the world. But I believe the roles are deeply intertwined, and that literature, the humanities, philosophy, history, and the arts are all ways of knowing the world. They do exactly the same thing in our understanding of the world. And it is really important to try to put these things together to bring people closer in talking to each other.

Literature, Humanities & Sustainability: PAOLA SPINOZZI - Coordinator, Phd Programme, Environmental Sustainability & Wellbeing, UNIFE

Literature, Humanities & Sustainability: PAOLA SPINOZZI - Coordinator, Phd Programme, Environmental Sustainability & Wellbeing, UNIFE

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Coordinator, Phd Programme, Environmental Sustainability & Wellbeing · University of Ferrara
Co-editor of Cultures of Sustainability and Wellbeing: Theories, Histories and Policies

The humanities are all about representing the world, while the sciences are all about knowing the world. But I believe the roles are deeply intertwined, and that literature, the humanities, philosophy, history, and the arts are all ways of knowing the world. They do exactly the same thing in our understanding of the world. And it is really important to try to put these things together to bring people closer in talking to each other.

What’s it like to film a supernatural thriller in darkness at minus 17 degrees? - Highlights - FLORIAN HOFFMEISTER

What’s it like to film a supernatural thriller in darkness at minus 17 degrees? - Highlights - FLORIAN HOFFMEISTER

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Academy Award-nominated Cinematographer
HBO’s True Detective: Night Country starring Jodie Foster · Kali Reis · Fiona Shaw

I drove for like a half an hour into absolute nothingness, and I left the car. It was three o'clock in the morning. It was minus 17 degrees and it was absolutely still. I've never experienced stillness such as that. I mean, it's like you feel like you can feel your atoms move or not move because it's so cold. And the sky is full of the Northern Lights. So you are already in a remote place, but you want to go further. And I think maybe those themes of going out into the wilderness are motivated by the urge to connect. And I think Issa López has really incorporated it beautifully into the script. And the show tells of this great disconnect between people. So not only are we disconnected from our environment, but we are disconnected from each other.

FLORIAN HOFFMEISTER - Cinematographer - True Detective: Night Country starring Jodie Foster & Kali Reis

FLORIAN HOFFMEISTER - Cinematographer - True Detective: Night Country starring Jodie Foster & Kali Reis

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Academy Award-nominated Cinematographer
HBO’s True Detective: Night Country starring Jodie Foster · Kali Reis · Fiona Shaw

I drove for like a half an hour into absolute nothingness, and I left the car. It was three o'clock in the morning. It was minus 17 degrees and it was absolutely still. I've never experienced stillness such as that. I mean, it's like you feel like you can feel your atoms move or not move because it's so cold. And the sky is full of the Northern Lights. So you are already in a remote place, but you want to go further. And I think maybe those themes of going out into the wilderness are motivated by the urge to connect. And I think Issa López has really incorporated it beautifully into the script. And the show tells of this great disconnect between people. So not only are we disconnected from our environment, but we are disconnected from each other.

Speaking Out of Place: BILL McKIBBEN, Co-Founder of 350.org, Founder Third Act & CAROLINE LEVINE, Author of The Activist Humanist

Speaking Out of Place: BILL McKIBBEN, Co-Founder of 350.org, Founder Third Act & CAROLINE LEVINE, Author of The Activist Humanist

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Co-Founder of 350.org · Founder Third Act · Author of The Activist Humanist

Viewed one way, we live in a very hopeful moment. Thanks to in large part the work of university scientists and engineers, we now live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That is to say, we could run our Earth on energy from heaven instead of hell, and we could do it fast. The fast is the hard part here. The only difference between all the examples of the long victories of social justice activism that we're in now is that this one is a time-limited problem. If we don't solve it fast, then no one's got a plan for how you refreeze the Arctic once you've melted it. And so we have to move very quickly. Our systems are not designed to move quickly. It's the easiest thing in the world to slow down and delay change, which is all that the fossil fuel industry at this point is trying to do, and that means that it's time for maximum effort from all of us. The story to tell is that the planet is outside its comfort zone, so we need to be outside ours.

Speaking Out of Place: SARA AHMED discusses The Feminist Killjoy Handbook

Speaking Out of Place: SARA AHMED discusses The Feminist Killjoy Handbook

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Author of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook
Independent Queer Feminist Scholar

You're more likely to progress if you say yes. It's a reproductive mechanism, which is why feminist culture knows so much about everything. We can explain how it is that institutions keep being reproduced in the same way. So what then do you do? Where do you go if your no has nowhere to go? And I think when you say no to the world, and you're pushed out by it, you still find your people. And that there's the world-making is in the people who find in the refusal of the institution a common ground.

Speaking Out of Place: MANIJEH MORADIAN discusses This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States

Speaking Out of Place: MANIJEH MORADIAN discusses This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States

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Author of This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States

So you start having Iranian students coming in the late 1950s. The numbers increased throughout the sixties and seventies. Tens of thousands of Iranian students, more than from any other country, come to the United States to study. At the moment, in 1979, the moment of the revolution, there were 50,000 or more students in the United States. So it's by far the largest foreign student population here. In the 1970s, it became possible for less affluent students to come. For the first time, there were more government scholarships available to certain groups of workers in the oil industry, for example, to their children. They were not blue-collar, but more like white-collar office workers. Before that, it had been mostly wealthy families who could afford to send their children abroad and who had access to education in the first place, but when you have less affluent students coming to less expensive, smaller colleges. By the 1970s, Iran had become so repressive that young people were trying to leave. They want to leave, and some of them want to leave intentionally to become activists and join the Iran student opposition movement.

Speaking Out of Place: SILVIA FEDERICI discusses Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons

Speaking Out of Place: SILVIA FEDERICI discusses Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons

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Scholar · Educator · Feminist Activist
Author of Caliban and the Witch
Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons

When I came to America I had a shock. I never knew what it meant to be in a country that seems to have no history, being in a place where you feel like you are nowhere, you could have been dropped by a plane in a cultural, historical desert. In the United States, they're destroying historic buildings. They've paved over cemeteries of African slaves. They're changing the environment so that memory is destroyed.

Because you are placing yourself in a broader arc of time, I asked a woman from Guatemala: how can women keep fighting for so much power? And she said, "Because, for us, the dead are not dead." This gives them the courage to go on when everything seems to be lost. I think that this is the kind of struggle that we need to make against war, against the destruction of nature.

Speaking Out of Place: SUSAN ALBUHAWA discusses “Palestine Writes”

Speaking Out of Place: SUSAN ALBUHAWA discusses “Palestine Writes”

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Novelist · Poet · Essayist · Scientist · Mother · Activist
Organizer of “Palestine Writes” · the only North American literature festival celebrating Palestinian Writers & Artists
Founder of the Children’s Organization Playgrounds for Palestine

Palestinians have been facing erasure for decades. There's the physical erasure of our villages, the names of our villages, the erasure of the word Palestine from the map, erasure of our identities. And now there's this kind of colonization of our narratives, of our stories, and our history. And Palestine Writes is part of a counterforce against this new form of colonization. The Zionist colonial narrative has always shifted with shifting wind, depending on what's in vogue at the time. Initially, it was a sort of romantic ending to Europe's genocide of its own Jewish population. And there was this epic myth of "a land without people for a people without land". And of course that was unsustainable.

Highlights - Dr. Jessica Hernandez - Author of “Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science"

Highlights - Dr. Jessica Hernandez - Author of “Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science"

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Transnational Indigenous Scholar, Scientist
Author of Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science

I live my life embodying the teaching my grandmother instilled in me – that no matter which lens I walked on, I had to learn how to build relationships with the land and the Indigenous peoples whose land I reside on to become a welcome guest. As a displaced Indigenous woman, my longing to return to my ancestral homelands will always be there, and this is why I continue to support my communities in the diaspora. However, my relationships are not only with my community, but also the Indigenous communities whose land I am displaced on, and this is the foundation of my work while residing in the Pacific Northwest. I strongly believe that in order to start healing Indigenous landscapes, everyone must understand their positionality as either settlers, unwanted guests, or welcomed guests, and that is ultimately determined by the Indigenous communities whose land you currently reside on or occupy. This teaching has also helped me envision my goals in life. Every day I get closer to becoming an ancestor because life is not guaranteed but rather a gift we are granted from our ancestors who are now in the spiritual world.

Dr. Jessica Hernandez - Transnational Indigenous Scholar, Scientist, Author of “Fresh Banana Leaves”

Dr. Jessica Hernandez - Transnational Indigenous Scholar, Scientist, Author of “Fresh Banana Leaves”

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Transnational Indigenous Scholar, Scientist
Author of Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science

I live my life embodying the teaching my grandmother instilled in me – that no matter which lens I walked on, I had to learn how to build relationships with the land and the Indigenous peoples whose land I reside on to become a welcome guest. As a displaced Indigenous woman, my longing to return to my ancestral homelands will always be there, and this is why I continue to support my communities in the diaspora. However, my relationships are not only with my community, but also the Indigenous communities whose land I am displaced on, and this is the foundation of my work while residing in the Pacific Northwest. I strongly believe that in order to start healing Indigenous landscapes, everyone must understand their positionality as either settlers, unwanted guests, or welcomed guests, and that is ultimately determined by the Indigenous communities whose land you currently reside on or occupy. This teaching has also helped me envision my goals in life. Every day I get closer to becoming an ancestor because life is not guaranteed but rather a gift we are granted from our ancestors who are now in the spiritual world.