Event overview
Whose voice? Nature, race and environmental advocacy
In the context of the current climate crisis and increasingly exacerbated environmental violence, issues of representation are paramount. Visual cultures determine how anthropogenic climate change is felt, understood and acted upon, and an aesthetic challenge is that of how to bear witness to ‘slow violence’ (Nixon) and ‘quasi-events’ (Povinelli) – to accumulative, often imperceptible conditions that spill into the future, felt pre-emptively in the present. Furthermore, the shortcomings of political representation – across lines of race, ethnicity, class and gender – are made visible in widespread climate colonialism and environmental racism. Who gets to bear witness or ‘speak’ for whom is profoundly caught in colonial legacies of subjectification, objectification and subjugation based on taxonomies of race and nature that persist to this day, as is the question of rights. Guided by a selection of art works, I explore some representational quagmires concerning ‘voice’, agency, narration, sovereignty and translation, extending these to relations between humans and environments and the capacity for self-representation and bearing witness of each.
Shela Sheikh is Lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she convenes the MA Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy and the PhD Cultural Studies. Prior to this she was Research Fellow and Publications Coordinator on the ERC-funded Forensic Architecture project (also Goldsmiths).
A recent multi-platform research project around colonialism, botany and the politics of the planting includes ‘The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions’, a special issue of Third Text co-edited with Ros Gray (vol. 32, issue 2–3, 2018), and Theatrum Botanicum (Sternberg Press, 2018), co-edited with Uriel Orlow, as well as numerous workshops on the topic with artists, filmmakers and environmentalists. Her current research interrogates various forms of witnessing between the human, technological and environmental. Together with Wood Roberdeau, she co-chairs the Goldsmiths Critical Ecologies Research Stream.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 21 Oct 2019 | 5:30pm - 7:00pm |
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