e-Race-sures

A conversation about whose voices, stories, and bodies matter in the environmental humanities and creative communities, with Dr. Anita Girvan, Rina Garcia Chua (PhD candidate), and Dr. Andil Gosine, in tandem with a provocation for issue 19.1 of The Goose: Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada

July 8, 2020 2:30pm to 3:15pm CST

Dr. Anita Girvan (she/her/they/them) is a diasporic Caribbean settler who was born and raised on Lhedli T'enneh territory (Prince George, BC) and is currently raising kids on Lekwungen and WSÁNEĆ territories (Victoria, Vancouver Island). As a scholar-activist in the cultural politics of climate change at Athabasca University, Girvan is interested in the power of stories, metaphors and songs as insurgent and resurgent knowledges with transformative potential. Dr. Girvan's work includes the book Carbon Footprints as Cultural-Ecological Metaphors (Routledge, 2017) and the article "Trickster Carbon" (Journal of Political Ecology 2017). Most recently, Girvan has contributed an essay on metaphors in a time of COVID-19 in the collection Sick of the System: Why the COVID-19 Recovery Must be Revolutionary (Between the Lines, 2020).

Rina Garcia Chua is currently a PhD Candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She is the editor of Sustaining the Archipelago: An Anthology of Philippine Ecopoetry (2018), and is working on an edited collection, Empire and Environment: Confronting Ecological Ruination in the Transpacific, with Heidi Hong, Jeffrey Santa Ana, and Xiaojing Zhou, forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press in 2021. She is also the Diversity Co-Officer for the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), and Poetry Editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada.

Andil Gosine is Professor of Environmental Arts & Justice at York University. Dr. Gosine’s scholarship and artistic and curatorial practices examine imbrications of ecology, desire and migration, and include numerous publications and multimedia projects, including his forthcoming monograph, Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean (Duke). Recent exhibitions of his work include rêvenir (Port of Spain, 2020), Deities, Parts I & II (New York in 2019), and Coolie Coolie Viens and All the Flowers (various, Canada, 2018). He is curator of the current retrospective exhibition, Wendy Nanan, running at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C. at least until the end of 2020, the first such dedicated to a Caribbean woman's work at the Institution.