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Craft, Critique, Culture Conference

Apr 20, 2023

All Day

English-Philosophy Building

251 West Iowa Avenue, Iowa City, IA 52242

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Our embeddedness within a more-than-human world is one part of what defines us as human. In the 1940s, Iowa-based environmentalist Aldo Leopold offered a land-based ethic: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” We hope to hear papers pursuing questions within and adjacent to the environment, broadly conceived. We are interested in how life is becoming less livable and for whom that is happening most rapidly. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Art Cullen reminds us, “Ultimately, we all will pay more for food that is of less nutritional value because we are flushing the nation’s greatest soil resource base to the depths of the gulf … We all have a sense of what is going on around here but are just beginning to recognize it for what it is: climate change.”

We are interested in the edges of who has been—or is still not recognized as—part of the human community and are inspired by such authors as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Donna Haraway, and Robert Bullard. Alongside the embedded histories of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that partially define the present, such authors highlight the practical and theoretical uses of storytelling, witnessing, information-gathering, and skill-sharing as a means of forging another world. How we imagine our solidarities with the earth, as our shared and imperiled space of commitment, struggle, and repair, is inseparable from how we imagine our relationship to one another.

Free and open to all.

Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all University of Iowa–sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires a reasonable accommodation in order to participate in this program, please contact in advance at