RISD Brown Symposium Climate Futures II - Design Politics, Design Natures, Aesthetics and the Green New Deal
Damian White
The sequel to Climate Futures 1: Design and the Just Transition which we held at RISD last November is upon us! Climate Futures II - Design Politics, Design Natures, Aesthetics and the Green New Deal is a collaboration between The Graduate Program in Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies at RISD, The Graduate Program in Global Arts and Culture and The Institute at Brown for Environment & Society. This year's symposium will draw together colleagues to discuss racial capitalism, decoloniality and environmentally just energy transitions, the future of the architectures in carbon constrained worlds, cyborg ecology & design justice, the aesthetic of the just transition and an inventive politics for a Green New Deal. Full text and details are below and tickets available here. Feel free to attend and circulate details of our symposium through your networks.
Thanks,
Damian White
Dean of Liberal Arts and Professor of Social Theory and Environmental Studies;
Rhode Island School of Design
2 College Street, Providence, RI 02903 USA
he/him/his
New Book!!!!! Environments, Natures and Social Theory: Towards a Critical Hybridity
New Article:
The Graduate Program in Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies at RISD, The Graduate Program in Global Arts and Culture and The Institute at Brown for Environment & Society presents:
Climate Futures II: Design Politics, Design Natures,
Aesthetics and the Green New Deal
Thursday Dec 5th 2019
Location: Metcalf Auditorium, Chace Center/RISD Museum
The Rhode Island School of Design.
Tickets available here https://www.eventbrite.com/e/climate-futures-ii-design-politics-aesthetics-the-green-new-deal-tickets-74484064843
Over the last two years the Green New Deal has come to define how we might
think about just post-carbon transition in the United States. Whilst denounced
by some conservatives and liberal ecomodernists as implausible and dismissed by
assorted climate doomsters as too little, too late, it still stands as the only
game in town for thinking about post-carbon futures. This symposium seeks to
shine a constructive, yet critical, light on not only the potentialities but
also the limitations of the Green New Deal as a political, design, cultural,
technological and aesthetic discourse and praxis.
The Green New Deal has generated a rich series of policy debates about the ways
in which just transitions could be stimulated and enacted. It has served as a
reminder of the many admirable ways in which the old New Deal defined a vision
of public works and public design, infrastructure and planning for the public
good. However - and as many Green New Dealers are well aware - the original New
Deal was also marked by multiple exclusions and a complicated racial, gender
and labor politics. It worked with a political imaginary largely bounded by the
US nation state. Its more radical ambitions were ultimately constrained and
contained. A Green New Deal will have to mobilize against fossil capitalism,
coloniality and an emboldened White supremacy in very different ways to the old
New Deal. It will have to address a global climate emergency that will require
building new forms of solidarity across borders and boundaries. It will also
have to open up discussions about the socio-technical and political design
pathways to post-carbon futures in ways that might force us to move beyond the
aesthetic and design horizons of “small is beautiful” era environmentalisms
without tumbling back into a paternalistic liberalism.
If the policy context that could inform a Green New Deal is slowly coming into
view, the cultural, aesthetic, socio-technological or design politics that
could further support and radicalize a new Green New Deal is less in evidence.
This could stand as a significant limitation to further progress given that we
know that just transitions to post-carbon futures are not going to emerge though
legislation alone nor will they be built through fear of extinction or
declarations of the need for eco-austerity. Diverse publics will have to be
mobilized at affective, cultural and political levels. A sense of political and
creative agency, desire and perhaps even joy in the opportunities that exist
for democratically designing and redesigning our worlds will all be vital for
enacting just post-carbon futures. The just transition, understood as the Green
New Deal or otherwise, will have to be imagined and built, fabricated and
realized, coded and created. Politicized processes of making, of prefiguring,
that occur again and again and again are going to be constitutive features of
the attempt to build survivable futures on a rapidly warming planet. New forms
of art and cultural production, new modes of solidarity and care, a new design
politics residing in new public institutions residing in many democratic spaces
will be required to disarm the fatalists and the fanatics. This symposium seeks
to consider how a Green New Deal might help us face down the climate doomsters
and denialists, think beyond technocrats and technophobes and build creative
political ecologies for the future.
Coffee 8.30am-9am
Introductions 9.00am-9.20am
9.00am-9.05am “Welcome to the Symposium/Welcome to
Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies at RISD” Jonathan Highfield GPD
Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies at RISD.
9.05am-9.15am. “Climate Futures, Design Politics and the Green New Deal: Some
Introductions” Damian White, Dean of Liberal Arts, RISD.
9.15am-10.30am
1. Architectural futures, public infrastructure+ the Green New Deal
The architectures have, to date, been somewhat inconsistent champions of just
transitions for low carbon futures. Sustainable design, with its rather
one-sided focus on deriving “lessons from nature”, has historically displayed
limited interest in class, race, labor, gender, or broader power relations.
Design schools and design professionals have regularly proclaimed that they can
play a leadership role in building low carbon futures but then continually
returned to “business as usual agendas”. The call for a Green New Deal, though,
has raised hopes that more radicalized visions of architecture, landscape
architecture and interior architecture could be renewed, revitalized and
reworked in more sophisticated ways. In this panel we will consider the extent
to which new forms of public works for the public good in sustainable urbanism,
green infrastructure and adaptive reuse could push back against green
gentrification and green neo-liberalism. We will explore the ways in which
labor struggles for just working conditions within architecture and design
could ally and reinforce the call for a Green New Deal. We consider how
architectural innovations with virtual reality could open up community
engagements with sea level rise. Finally, we struggle with the extent to which
the national imaginary of a Green New Deal can address the profound
cross-border impacts and global design challenges posed by climate change.
Chair: Ijlal Muzaffar (RISD THAD/Global Arts and Culture Graduate Program
Director)
• Billy Fleming (Ian L. McHarg Center, UPenn). “Landscape
Architecture and the Green New Deal.”
• Peggy Deamer (Yale/The Architecture Lobby); “Labor, Architecture and the
Green New Deal.”
• Daniel Barber (Architecture, UPenn). “After Comfort.”
• Liliane Wong (Interior Architecture, RISD) “INTAR, VR and Rising Sea levels.”
Discussant Amy Kulper (Architecture, RISD).
Sponsored by the Division of Liberal Arts
10.30am-10.45am Coffee
10.45am-11.50am
2. Dialogue Session: Racial Capitalism, designs for energy transition and the
Green New Deal
Industrialized energy has long been predicated on a system of racial capitalism
and colonialism. We rely on electricity, heat, and fuels that derive value
through the historical and ongoing displacement and exploitation of indigenous,
black, and Latinx land, labor and life. The Green New Deal could offer an
opportunity to not only overhaul this existing fossil fuel infrastructure but
also redress the racial capitalism on which it is built. In this dialogue, we
will explore some of the tensions that currently exist between the urgent need
to move as fast as possible to implement a clean energy transition and concerns
that, if this transition is not done right, it could recreate new environmental
injustices and new sacrifice zones. We will consider the ways in which
environmental justice movements are productively contributing to new decolonial
visions of energy transition. Finally, we will explore the opportunities that
exist for confronting and dismantling racial capitalism through a Green New
Deal framework, focusing on policies, strategies, and overarching principles.
Chair: Lauren Richter (HPSS/NCSS RISD)
Discussants: Myles Lennon (Anthropology, Brown), Shalanda H.Baker (Law, Public
Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University) and Jacqui Patterson,
(Director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program).
Sponsored by RISD’s Office of Social Equity and Inclusion
11.50am-12.00am Break
12.00am-1.10pm
3: Liberatory ecotechnologies, cyborg ecologies and the Green New Deal
In the 1960s, Murray Bookchin argued that a post-capitalist ecological society
would have to incorporate automation plus liberatory eco-technologies to
provide the infrastructure of a new ecological society. Eco-design and
eco-technology running alongside much broader forms of social change could not
only reawaken humanity’s sense of dependence on the environment but restore
selfhood and competence to a “client citizenry.” Contemporary debates on the
socio-technical infrastructure that could underpin survivable futures have
become increasingly anxious, ill-tempered and polemical. Whether we consider
debates around 100% renewables or 100% clean, lab meat or the future of
agriculture, either/or logics would seem to run through the ever sharper
exchanges between de-growthers and ecomodernists. A worsening climate crisis is
clearly exacerbating the stakes of the discussion and acting as a ratchet forcing
reframings of our understanding of acceptable and unacceptable technologies. In
this session we explore what exactly it might mean to advocate for liberatory
technologies, design justice and a progressive technological politics in an age
of climate chaos and cyborg ecologies.
• Kai Bosworth (School of World Affairs, VCU) “Out of the woods: liberatory
technologies revisited”.
• Sasha Costanza-Chock (Civic Media, MIT) “Design Justice
for the Green New Deal.”
• Holly Jean Buck (Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, UCLA) “Why
we need to think in progressive utopian ways about carbon removal
technologies.”
• Sophie Lewis “Aminotechnics.”
1.10pm-2.20pm :LUNCH
2.20pm- 3.30pm
4: Liberatory aesthetics for a just transition?
Building survivable futures on a warming planet is not simply going to involve
policy for a Green New Deal. Just transitions to post-carbon just futures are
inevitably going to raise very significant aesthetic, political and cultural
issues about the worlds that we are leaving behind and the world that we need
to design and make. The Green New Deal or the just transition more broadly has
developed little in the way of a new aesthetic or cultural politics. Its
primary co-ordinates have been to look back to the political and public
aesthetics that emerged around the first New Deal of the 1930s or turn to the
aesthetic that emerged out of predominantly white US environmentalisms of the
1970s. Do we need to find other ways to “stay with the trouble” to paraphrase
Donna Haraway as we try and construct survivable futures? What might a joyful,
aesthetics of a just transition look like that can come to terms with the loss
of certain kinds of nature-cultures, modes of valuing and modes of making and
be open to the challenge of designing new cosmopolitan nature-cultures, new
ways of valuing and new modes of future making? Can we envisage an aesthetic
and cultural politics that reclaims low carbon pleasures present in everyday
life? Does a progressive cultural politics for a just transition require a
broader decentering of Eurocentric or US centric environmental aesthetics and a
more sustained engagement with the insights of decolonial, Latinx, post
humanist, cosmopolitical and other currents? In this panel we ponder the kinds
of liberatory aesthetics and cultural politics that could underpin the
just transition and offer solidarity and hope across borders and boundaries.
Chair: Paula Gaetano Adi (RISD, Experimental and Foundation Studies)
• Yuriko Saito (Nature, Culture, Sustainability Studies/HPSS RISD)
“Environmental Aesthetics and Everyday Life."
• Anathastia Raina (Graphic Design, RISD) “Cyborg Ecology for the Green New
Deal.”
• Priscilla Ybarra (English, University of North Texas) “Latinx
Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial.”
Discussant: Nicholas Pevzner (Landscape Architecture, U,Penn).
Sponsored by RISD’s Experimental and Foundation Studies and RISD Graduate
Program in Global Arts and Culture
3.30pm -3.45pm Coffee
3.45pm –5pm
5. Thinking beyond the ecology of panic: The political opportunity of the Green
New Deal.
The prospect that climate conditions may have reached a point of no return has
now become a reoccurring motif of assorted climate doomsters who seem to
delight in telling working and marginalized people that “their goose is
cooked.” This is a politics that the Green New Deal clearly has to face down.
An ecology of panic at best is going to feed “passive nihilism” (Connolly,
2016) and “melancholic paralysis” (Wark, 2015) but in addition it could feed
the rise of eco-fascism and eco-apartheid. In this concluding session, we
consider the extent to which a politics of a Green New Deal framed around the
need for environmentally just investment and infrastructure, a fundamental
reworking of class, race and gender relations, new modes of democratic
planning and approaches to global politics focused on a new
internationalism and solidarity across borders could open up very different
paths.
Timmons Roberts Chair (Brown)
• Alyssa Battistoni (Harvard College) “Cyborg Ecosocialism + Gendered
Labor + the Green New Deal.”
• Kian Goh (Urban Planning, UCLA) “Urban Planning + Design for a Green New
Deal.”
• Dan Traficonte (Urban Studies + Planning, MIT) “An Innovation Policy
for the Green New Deal.”
• Thea Riofrancos (Political Science, Providence College) “A Globally Just
Green New Deal”.
Discussant: Camilo Viveiros, George Wiley Center
Sponsored by The William R. Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance, Brown University and The Institute at Brown for Environment and Society