Meetings 

October 26, 2023, 4-6:00 pm: Join NSP in conversation with shared morsels and refreshments around The Green Table, located in the Muir College quad. Seaweed pressings made at last year's spring capstone event will be on display and available for pick up by those who participated. In the meantime, please put us on your calendars and send us an RSVP here.

November 30, 2023, 2-4:00 pm: Please RSVP to join us in MCTF Conference Room 202 (Scripps Institution of Oceanography) for an NSP event with Dr. Craig Santos Perez centered around the collection of eco-poetry in his book Habitat Threshold. 

Perez is from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). He is the co-editor of seven anthologies, including Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures. He is also the author of six books of poetry and the monograph Navigating Chamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization. 

Wednesday, January 31st, 3-5 pm: Join us us in a conversation with Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb and Dr. Gary Fields, moderated by Dr. Amanda Batarseh. The event is co-sponsored by the Program for the Study of Religion and the Middle East Studies Program. Please RSVP here. Space is limited.

Palestinian Landscapes of Dispossession and Rooted Resilience centers the expanded field of landscape as "a medium and method" (Khayyat, 2022) for illuminating histories and futures of Palestine in relation with global Indigenous and environmental justice movements. In dialogue with Dr. Muhtaseb, Dr. Fields, and Dr. Bataresh, we seek to bring landscape to the foreground by attending to human and more-than-human relationships, environmental temporalities, and (agri)cultural practices, that endure and resist the ongoing and deepening structures of settler-colonial violence and dispossession of Palestinian people and places. 

Monday, March 11, 3-5 pm (on zoom only): Join us in a conversation with Brian Goldfarb and Judith Faifman. To receive a zoom link, RSVP here. 

In their talk, "Care and Translation in Times of Existential Crisis,” Goldfarb and Faifman take as an example forms of mobilization in Latin America by groups such as the Landless Rural Workers Movement and La Via Campesina, to explore how experiences of translation, interpretation, and interconnectedness embed care mediation in public processes of problematization. Goldfarb and Faifman argue that in the context of heightened threats to human well-being and environmental health at local, regional, and global scales, we are witnessing the emergence of sustained collaborative networked efforts that reconfigure the relationships between academic and non-academic actors and intertwine scholarship with activist and citizen media. Fundamental to the emergence of these networks are forms of translation across modes of existence and styles of inquiry that their constituents enact as they strive to articulate shared understandings of hurdles and goals (“care problems”). The analysis of participation in long-termist social movements in Latin America and globally allows us to characterize care problem posing as the relational and processual coproduction of multidimensional understanding of situated and interdependent problems. A process that entails the acknowledgement of viable alternative solutions, while making explicit the principles and criteria of decision making, monitoring the impacts of interventions, and assessing the equity and sustainability of modes of resolution. 

Thursday, April 25, 2:30-4:00 pm: Join us for a follow-up to our winter event, "Palestinian Landscapes of Dispossession and Rooted Resilience," Nature, Space, and Politics would like to invite you to a reading-dialogue session in the Community Commons Room in the Design and Innovation Building (Room 330). 

In collaboration with Dr. Amanda Batarseh, we convene around a selection of readings that center ecologies of food in Palestine as complex epistemic sites and practices of place-making and imagination within and against settler-colonial eco-occupation and genocide.

While drawing on discussions and themes touched upon in our winter event, the centering of food and food systems as weaponization and mediation of power is also provoked by the state of Israel and their transnational collaborators' structural creation of famine, or the "brink" of famine, in Gaza. We look toward ecologies of food as vivid and, in many ways, violent and problematic, sites of place-making, memory, everyday labor of care, imagination, and futurity.

Our readings take shape around and build off Dr. Lila Sharif's works "Vanishing Palestine" and "Savory Colonialism" to think with how "the story of vanishment"—and the everyday writing, foraging, cooking, and imagining against it —is unable to be encapsulated by legal and positivist renderings; nor is the story linear and inevitable. How does food offer a medium/pathway to assess and critique settler-colonial spatial arrangements, historical narratives, and other structures of violence while also mapping and building decolonized geographies and futures?

Thurs. Oct. 13, 4-6 pm: Fall Welcome Reception on the Communication building patio. An informal gathering to usher in the academic year and meet folks involved in the group. Light catering will be provided. Feel free to stop by this Thursday, even if you did not get a chance to RSVP.

Thurs. Oct. 20, 4-5:30 pm: NSP, Just Transitions and COGR 275. Environmental Communication Collaborative Reading: On Max Liboiron's Pollution Is Colonialism. We are not assigning specific pages, so read any selections that pique your curiosity. Optional to also read the CLEAR Lab's Manual which outlines their research praxis. Meeting will be held in the JTI Lab rm. 331 (Design and Innovation building- across from the Trolley station).

Thursday, Jan. 26, 4-6pm: Please join us for a zoom roundtable on Climate and Environmental Justice in SE Asia. It will feature a fantastic and diverse group of speakers, including a leading journalist and a former Goldman Prize EJ winner from East Timor. This event is organized by Global South Studies and co-sponsored by NSP and a number of other organizations across campus.

Thursday, Feb. 16,  2- 3:30pm at PEB 721 (Public Engagement Building, located in the new Sixth College): We are very excited to kick off Winter Qtr. Nature, Space, Politics events with a book discussion of Prof. Eric Stanley's new book, Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable. This event is co-sponsored by the Triton Underground Scholars, Breathable Streets, the Communication Department's Democracy Lab, and the Institute of Arts and Humanities. 

Reading & Informal Discussion Session on Tuesday Oct 12th (4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. PDT @ zoom). For our first meeting of the year, we convine to discuss two readings and building upon the following provocations: what is border(ing) as method? How is it performed? Who can perform it? Why do border(ing)s matter/or not/beyond geographical & institutional borders?

• Chapter 2. “Fabrica Mundi” (pp. 27-60) from Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor, by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (Duke University Press, 2013)
• Chapter 5. “Borders, Cigarettes, and Sovereignty” (pp. 115-146) from Mohawk Interruptus (Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States) by Audra Simpson (Duke University Press, 2014)

Guest Speakers Lorena Gómez Mostajo, Rihan Yeh, and David Morison Portillo to discuss the recent publication of Border Looping/ Vueltas Fronterizo. The book discusses David's performance-protest crossing the US-Mexico border, and our conversation can expand on questions such as: What was the experience of doing the performance-protest? What editorial decisions went into the book's publication? How are the multiple forms of border(ing)s expressed in this act and book? What is the relation between transgression and refusal?

We urge you all to support Taller California, and purchase this wonderful book directly through them! You can find a copy to purchase at: https://tallercalifornia.cargo.site/Libros

 Standing Ground, Slowing Down, and Refusals to Extractivism in Kumeyaay Land. Tuesday, Dec. 7 from 2-3:30 pm Nature, Space, Politics hosts a conversation with Bobby Wallace, a leader of the Barona Band of Mission Indians. Wallace is an active organizer, involved in sending support from San Diego to Standing Rock, and in countering the SD-TJ border wall. Our conversation will emphasize the ways in which the border crosses Kumeyaay land, and the various practices of resistance and refusal against such division. We will focus attention on the extractive practices of borders, refusals to State borders, and contemporary Kumeyaay activism against the State bordering process. This meeting will also feature Prof. Boatema Boateng (Communication) and Prof. Cathy Gere (History; UCSD Green New Deal) as discussants. There is no reading for this event; please come prepared to listen and engage in conversation.

• Talk title: “The Relationship Between Indigenous Rights and Rights of Nature: Lessons from Ecuador and New Zealand.”
• Abstract: Over the last decade, a growing number of countries have adopted legal provisions recognizing natural ecosystems as subjects with rights. In many cases, including Ecuador, Bolivia, and New Zealand, these laws resulted from Indigenous peoples’ struggles to change the way “development” is understood and practiced in their territories. Yet, many Indigenous peoples remain skeptical and wary of the concept of “rights of Nature,” which is a foreign concept that at best represents an imperfect attempt to translate Indigenous cosmovisions into Western legal systems. While some worry that rights of nature may conflict with indigenous rights, others see these rights as potentially inter-related and complementary. Dr. Kauffman examines the tension between Indigenous rights and rights of nature, and discusses how these tensions are being resolved through the application of rights of nature laws in Ecuador and New Zealand. 

Guest Speaker Prof. Marisol de la Cadena (UC Davis) on Thursday Dec 5th, 2019 (4 p.m. - 6 p.m. @ Sequoyah Room 103) -  In December 2019, we invited  Prof. Marisol de la Cadena, author of Earth Beings (Duke), as our guest speaker. Marisol opened with some provocations to guide the group discussion, which was centered around two excerpts of Marisol's writing: Story 4 from Earth Beings, "Mariano's Archive: The Eventfulness of the Ahistorical"; and Chapter 1 from Anthropos and the Material, "Uncommoning Nature: Stories from the Anthropo-Not-Seen".

Diverse Ways of Knowing Nature Workshop 

Urban Waterscapes Workshop 

In June 2018, we organized a day long workshop on “Urban Water scapes” (June 2018) where we brought three guest speakers (Prof. Irene Klaver, Prof. Stephanie Kane, and Prof. Kim de Wolff) and where several of the members of the group (Prof. Elana Zilberg, Prof. Matt Vitz, Prof. Ameeth Vijay, Prof. Matilde Cordoba Azcarate and graduate student Kevan Malone) shared their work in progress. The workshop included a field-trip component as a binational tour in the Tijuana-San Diego estuary led by Oscar Romo of Alter Terra. See the Urban Waterscapes workshop program and participants' abstracts (PDF).