When: Nov 13, 5:45-7:30 PM

Where: PIGOTT HALL (BLDG. 260), RM. 216

Title: Extractivism Revisited. A panel with Laurie Palmer and Orlando Bentancor
Co-hosted by materia and the Environmental Humanities Project

Laurie Palmer, UC Santa Cruz

Professor Palmer’s work is concerned with material explorations of matter’s active nature
as it asserts itself on different scales and in different speeds, and with collaborating on
strategic actions in the contexts of social and environmental justice. These two directions
sometimes run parallel and sometimes converge, taking form as sculpture, installation,
writing, and public projects. Collaboration, with other humans and with non-humans, is a
central ethic in her practice.

Talk Title: Sedimental Advocacy

This talk will explore some of the contradictions involved in advocating for the rights of
nature in courts of law as a strategy to stem the tide of extractive practices, and address the
specific and local situation of “advocating” for an underground shale formation in a legal
battle in Monterey County.

Orlando Bentancor, Barnard College

Professor Bentancor's main interests include Colonial Latin American literature and
intellectual history; Medieval and Early Modern Spanish philosophy; literature, science,
and technology; and poststructuralist philosophy and postcolonial theory.
Talk title: Wars Over Water: An Eco-Perspectival Approach.

This talk will discuss the struggle for political and environmental control of the Andean
world and its relationship with the models with which water is conceived. These models, or
modes of understanding the materiality of water are informed by ambivalent metaphors. By
employing an eco-perspectival approach that shifts between ecological and economic
symbolic formations, this talk will focus on the impasses that emerge out of the failure to
master, dominate, and commodify water.