As our Earth Week events passed and the Covid-19 pandemic came to inhabit our lives a bit more thoroughly (some of us quite directly), EcoCultureLab took an unannounced hiatus from normal activities. The University of Vermont has struggled, as have other institutions, to determine how to respond to the virus’s continuing presence in our lives. Announcements of an impending return back to campus this September have been reconsidered, with the fall semester now looking more like an uncertain mix of on-campus and remote learning.
Meanwhile, life in Burlington, like life in other American cities, has also been affected, with public events at a minimum, but with the presence of a second uninvited guest taking on a sudden concreteness that few had anticipated. That uninvited guest is one that has been with us — with “America” — since its beginning. It is racism, of a deep, systemic, and traumatic sort, and it is only a “guest” in that its presence is generally unacknowledged by the majority.
The nation’s response to the George Floyd murder has been earth-shaking for many. It has pinpointed the way that issues of social justice and racial discrimination — so much a part of the impact of Covid-19 already, and of climate change and other slow disasters of our time — are front and center not only in the lives of millions of African-Americans and other racialized groups in this country, but in the lives of a majority of humanity. There’s a long history to that (which, if you’re not familiar with it, should mean some catch-up reading at the very least… among other readings I’ve been recommending are recent books by Christina Sharpe, Tiffany Lethabo King, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Neshime and Williams’ Racial Ecologies anthology, and Kris Manjapra’s Colonialism in Global Perspective for an excellent summary of the long, big picture).
In the wake of all this crisis and uncertainty, a situation in which we are all still getting our individual and collective bearings, it’s been difficult to get a clear sense of what an uncertain mobile unit of creative intelligence (we hope) like EcoCultureLab should be doing. (As I wrote elsewhere, “The machine has stopped… What now?”) So much is in motion, so much is in play. The pandemic remains as alive as ever, with lives upended in every which direction. Hopes that an impending election may change things seem all too unreliable, uncertain, or nebulous for many.
With all of that in the background, I’d like to see EcoCultureLab remaining active at least on three reasonably manageable fronts this fall. The first has to do with how we participate in the local community; the second, in the university community (while rethinking what that means); and the third, in the online world that connects us to eco-artists, scholars, and practitioners around the world.
1) Life goes on: EcoCultureLab will restart its Research Raps in September as virtual Friday afternoon gatherings exploring topics of collective interest. Suggestions for topics and readings are welcome (such as perhaps one of the above, or Kathryn Yusoff’s short but provocative A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None). Meanwhile, kindred creative souls in the Burlington area are responding to the current set of crises in creative and hopeful ways and we intend to participate in those in one way or another. Among other things, we’d like to draw attention to next month’s DegrowthFest, a community-wide series of installations and happenings reflecting on what our current crises reveal about our governments, institutions, and communities, and exploring potential futures for Burlington and beyond. That will take place August 14-16 in the Old North End and other parts of the greater Burlington area. We hope to post more about it soon.
2) Rethinking the university: The coronavirus pandemic and the crisis of race and social justice both highlight the ways in which our current institutions, including our universities, are radically inadequate to the challenges they’re going to need to address. What’s the appropriate future for higher education? How might we take advantage of the current situation to realign the university into more productive relationships with the communities around it (while avoiding the already substantial push toward “coronavirus capitalism”)? Participating in these conversations is important for faculty, for students, and for community members, and EcoCultureLab hopes to be able to facilitate some of them. More concretely, EcoCultureLab affiliates (including myself) are involved in developing a new Ph.D. program that takes its lead from the practice-based, social-justice infused, low-residency Master’s in Leadership for Sustainability program, which has made wonderful inroads into rethinking what a master’s program should be and who it should serve. We’ll share more information on that soon as well.
3) Online restart: After the summer hiatus (interrupted by this post and perhaps a few more), we hope to relaunch this online space as an arena for commentary, reflection, and discussion. One planned thread will involve asking prominent theorists and practitioners in the eco-arts to tell us what current reading is informing and inspiring their work. This will hopefully become a kind of “cooking with guests,” where the ingredients are ideas and readings from the cutting-edges of eco-cultural thought and practice. More on that soon as well.
We hope you stay with us for these activities, shower us with feedback, badger us with suggestions and critiques, and generally remember that we are here. EcoCultureLab hopes to be part of the larger ecocultural laboratory of a humanity making its way through some thick brambles towards something that is, as yet, difficult to ascertain. We are these people and others — join us with your hopes, ideas, and interventions. We look and move, ever, forward.
Photo: Found assemblage, Haida Gwaii. A. Ivakhiv