Re: [plots-boston] Sep 4-5, 2015, Brown University hosting “Land and Water, A Long-Term Perspective.”
Shannon Dosemagen
On Friday, June 26, 2015, Liz Barry <l...@publiclab.org> wrote:
--Hi Northeast Public Lab,I'm excited to pass on this conference invitation from Jo Guldi at Brown University. If you are thinking about attending, i'd love to hear and possibly coordinate travel/local housing.“Land and Water, A Long-Term Perspective”Sep 4-5, 2015Brown University, Providence Rhode Island---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jo Guldi <jo_g...@brown.edu>
Date: Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 10:52 AMSubject: conference invitation
Dear Liz,
I'm organizing a conference that is basically designed with the idea of land/water activists and historians hanging out and helping each other to tell stories. On Sep 4-5, 2015, Brown University is hosting a conference on “Land and Water, A Long-Term Perspective.” We would be thrilled if you could join us and bring along everyone from your community who would profit from such a meeting.
Committed headline speakers include:
John M. Barry, author: Rising Tide; participant in a historic lawsuit against Exxon http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/02/magazine/mag-oil-lawsuit.html?_r=2
Laura Gottesdiener, journalist, author: A Dream Foreclosed
Activists and academics from different areas in the humanities and social sciences will gather at Brown on the weekend of September 4-5, 2015 to discuss tensions between environmental stress, ecological realities, and human institutions. We will explore themes of reduced access resulting from these tensions, such as forms of property-holding, leases, and contracts; forms of control exerted or facilitated by the state, by law, by other institutions; or exclusions of class, race, and gender. In the context of global warming, issues of access to land and water have been revived at a moment of disappearing land, mass migration, evictions, foreclosures, land grabs, and the privatization of clean water. We believe that it is vital for academics and activists to enter a shared conversation about control and access to land and water, naming the most formidable challenges, the utopian models, and the important historical analogues for our present moment.
The conference departs from Marx’s gloss that the early-modern enclosure of public commons into privately-owned tracts of land represented the “original sin” of capitalism, the moment from which all other forms of capitalist appropriation must be read and interpreted. We believe that history has lessons to offer about how change is introduced to society. In taking this long perspective, the conference invites proposals that look backwards in order to look forward.
This conversation begins from the conviction that there is an emerging community of land and water-access oriented activists and academics across many fields and subjects of interest -- urban and rural, intellectual and technological, retrospective and prospective -- who are only starting to discover the possible connections across these boundaries. We hope that in bringing these individuals together, an enormous amount of energy will be released.
I very much hope that you will be able to join us. Further details follow. Please freely circulate this announcement to anyone who might be interested.
Sincerely,
Jo Guldi
Hans Rothfels Asst. Professor of the History of Britain and its Empire
Brown University
Participants & Audience
The conference will invite academics to entertain questions geared towards a public and activist audience about how meaningful change occurs in societies, the context in which it happens, and how that may inform us today. Our headline speakers include Laura Gottesdiener, one of the foremost journalists documenting the mortgage and eviction crisis, and John M. Barry, independent historian and activist involved in a historic lawsuit against Exxon for the Gulf Oil Spill of 2010. The call for participation has targeted both activist and academic audiences, with both domestic and international areas of focus, and we hope that the meeting of these groups will provide an unprecedented opportunity for mutual learning.
Activists will have the opportunity to articulate large structural conceptions such as capitalism, empire, or debt in relation to access to land and water. This can help activists and organizers orient themselves in terms of a larger story. Activists will gain up-to-date historical perspectives on other moments when issues of access have been in question, consuming stories that inspire and caution, and big-picture narratives that can have the potential to inspire and invigor larger publics to their cause. They will have a chance to tell their stories, to seek feedback from scholars versed in comparative or historical contexts, and to pose questions that they need answered. These dialogues offer a chance to explore the relevance of academic analysis to contemporary concerns. Conversation offers a chance to share alternative visions of how access to landholding and water could work.
Academics will have an opportunity to be inspired by the practical questions of activists acting in the present, as activists talk about their work, their present projects, questions, and concerns. In the years since Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons,” other scholars have contested the thesis that inclusive political institutions necessarily lead to ecological tragedy; and the students of Elinor Ostrom have highlighted forms of peasant cooperation and mutual aid as alternative arrangements of land and water allocation. The poles of privatization and mutual aid raise questions about how societies change from one path to another, whether through top-down imposition of rules, through bottom-up organization, in reaction to pressure of scarcity, through the transforming power of ideas, the spread of technology, or the adaptation of new modes or organization. Academics have an important service to render by telling the stories of long term transformation and enable activists to frame their projects in light of a larger cultural project of rethinking institutions and working with memory.
A Format for Knowledge-Sharing
The conference is entirely designed around opportunities for creating and sharing knowledge in a larger community of academics and activists. If you choose to attend the conference, you may look forward to:
3-4 panels of short, engaging presentations about pre-circulated papers for learning about new scholarship and recent activist projects
2-3 facilitated thematic and methodological roundtables designed to connect you to other participants interested in similar themes, for instance:
The Anthropocene. Climate change as influencer. Defining large-scale historical epochs and their influence on later political crises.
Enclosure, disappropriation, institutions. Access to credit. Corruption and exploitation. Leases. Mortgages. Regulation. Contracts. The state. Theories and systems of property.
Utopian solutions. Critical theories of resource allocation. Theories of change. The role of technology. The spread of ideas
speed-dating-style lightening-reviews for potential ventures (e.g., the next book, the next project, what would you do with a million-dollar grant, the funding venture that you’d like to start; if you got your way, which institutions would you change right now and how?)
a media station and ongoing documentary filmmaking designed to transform this gathering into a long-term community with a larger public audience
name tags and other devices to help participants to meet, recognize common areas of interest, and continue interacting after the venue
Application & Registration
If you are interested in attending, we’d like to invite you to register so as to help us to better organize the event: http://goo.gl/forms/YR51d0CBxY. Deadline: July 15, 2015. If you’d like to circulate the short call for papers to other audiences, please find the one-page CFP here: bit.ly/landandwaterconf
Housing/Transport
Flights to the Providence airport (PVD) booked in advance are often very inexpensive. In addition, the MBTA, Amtrak, and Peter Pan offer easy, direct connections direct to NY (3 hrs) and Boston (1 hr). At Brown Ellen White is available (returning from vacation July 7) to help with booking hotels: Ellen...@brown.edu. These expenses will not be automatically covered for speakers, as we are reserving our limited funds for participants without access to other resources.
Compensation
Many of the individuals invited to this conference include activists who have limited access to funds for travel whereas we are supported by institutions. We therefore request that faculty who have access to research funds use them. Senior academics will not be offered honoraria and will be asked to use their own travel budgets to attend the conference. Limited subsidies and local guestrooms may be available for these guests and others who are financially challenged. Those who need it may apply for funding here: http://goo.gl/forms/YR51d0CBxY. Deadline: July 15, 2015. Our hope is that this strategy will be an enticement of a particular kind for our other potential speakers -- the opportunity to interact with a community genuinely interested in the relevance of academic stories to contemporary struggles.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------Jo Guldi, Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of the History of Britain and its Empire, Brown UniversityYou can schedule a meeting with me here--Liz Barry
director of community development
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