Field Station 2 | Extractive Infrastructures and Imaginaries
This traveling seminar considers the ongoing geological, biological, and social formation of the Midwest in order to locate the historical, political and philosophical roots of the environmental crisis as it manifests in this territory. The seminar unfolds over five days in the landscape marked physically by the action of glaciers, shaped by the enduring presence of Indigenous nations, and defined politically by the colonization that intensified after the 1832 Black Hawk conflict. Bringing together Native leaders, local residents, scholars, activists, and artists for a series of lectures, tours, and conversations, the seminar aims to understand the origins and effects of the present engineered landscape and build alliances for more just and sustainable futures.
The seminar travels from Wisconsin to Illinois to examine the interplay of displacement, immigration, and hydrological engineering in producing the landscapes of extractive agriculture celebrated in the racialized mythology of the American “heartland.” Situating both the heartland and the Anthropocene in the context of global capitalism, the day’s activities seek to work through such extractive imaginaries in order to establish alternate visions of just coexistence and mutual support.
- Saturday, Sep 28, 2019
9:30 am - 11:30 am
Walking Activity with Stephanie Springgay and Toby Beauchamp
Ice Age to Anthropocene Age Trail at Indian Lake 1 8381 State Highway 19 Cross Plains, WI 53528Stephanie Springgay is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. She is a scholar of research-creation with a focus on walking, affect, queer theory, and contemporary art as pedagogy. She directs the SSHRC-funded research-creation project The Pedagogical Impulse which explores the intersections between contemporary art and pedagogy. As a site for artistic-research it has initiated a number of experimental, critical, and collaborative projects including: a series of artist-residencies in K-12 classrooms; the creation of curriculum materials and resources on social practice art; and a series of curatorial projects including Instant Class Kit—a mobile exhibition and curriculum guide. With Sarah Truman she co-directs WalkingLab— an international network of artists and scholars committed to critical approaches to walking methods. Other curatorial projects include The Artist’s Soup Kitchen—a six week performance project that explore food soveriegnty, queer feminist solidarity, and the communal act of cooking and eating together. She has published widely on contemporary art, curriculum studies, and qualitative research methodologies.
Toby Beauchamp is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and affiliate faculty in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His book, Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices (2019) shows how the scrutinizing of gender nonconformity is motivated less by explicit transgender identities than by the perceived threat that gender nonconformity poses to the U.S. racial and security state. Beauchamp’s new research brings trans studies into conversation with the environmental humanities to consider topics such as the transnational production and circulation of synthetic hormones, U.S. border patrol and ecological destruction, and the creation and maintenance of long-distance hiking trails. His writing has appeared in journals including GLQ, Feminist Formations, and Surveillance & Society, as well as several edited book collections.
This event is limited capacity; email Sarah Kanouse – s.kanouse@northeastern.edu – to inquire about space.
3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Field Trip with Alyosha Goldstein and Ryan Griffis
John Deere Pavilion 1, 1400 River Drive Moline, IL 61265At the John Deere Pavilion, visitors can see the contemporary manifestation of the ideologies that replaced the entire Tallgrass Prairie of Illinois with seemingly endless fields of corn and soybeans. Deere’s production line—from its early plows to today’s million-dollar combine harvesters—has played a significant role in turning settler-colonial dreams into reality. It’s gleaming green and yellow machines are forged by urban labor and destined for use in rural spaces around the world. They are a character in, what William Cronon has called, the “larger tale of people reshaping the land to match their collective vision of its destiny.” The surface of that vision is of a wild country made productive through technological capital, the pastoral imaginary of family farmers feeding the world. Holding up that vision, however, are the less visible technologies of indigenous dispossession and chattel slavery that cleared the land in advance of the plow.
This event is limited capacity; email Sarah Kanouse – s.kanouse@northeastern.edu – to inquire about space.
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
The Land in Pieces
Butterworth Center Library 2, 1105 8th Street Moline, IL 61265Lecture by Alyosha Goldstein
How has agriculture been central to the mythology of “America”? This talk focuses on how ideas about agriculture as a relation to land, place, and belonging based on domestication, possession, extraction, and freedom have served as a justification for colonialism historically and in the present. How does the connection between the social imaginaries of white nationalism and changing farmland economies matter in this regard? In what way are such colonial and racial relations to land, place, and belonging necessarily shaped as a response to the presence and futurity of Indigenous nations and peoples rendered outside the frame of the white nationalist imaginary? Situating the “heartland” of what is presently the United States in the context of the global capitalist transformations and the predominance of large-scale corporate agriculture, this talk examines the ongoing consequences of colonial and racial dispossession and asks what addressing such consequences demands in terms of collective struggle, for what Grace Hong calls “the impossible politics of difference,” for new social imaginaries, and living relations to land and place otherwise.
Alyosha Goldstein’s research interests include the study of globalization, neoliberalism, and social movements; comparative histories of imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism; modern liberalism and twentieth-century political culture; critical race and indigenous studies; the history and politics of public health; and social and political theory. Goldstein’s current research focuses on United States colonialism, the normative racial and gendered logics of neoliberalism, and economies of dispossession in the historical present. He is working on a book manuscript entitled “Colonial Accumulations: Racial Capitalism and the Colonial Present” that uses recent legislation as a critical analytic lens through which to address current debates over racism, colonialism, and other modes of expropriation and devaluation, and to examine the jurisprudence of redress during our present era of economic crisis. He is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.
RSVP via Eventbrite: http://bit.ly/GoldsteinLecture
