Cultural Studies Program

This event is devoted to rethinking the relationship between climate crisis, activism, and care. Rather than looking to restore hope and reknit broken bonds of sympathy, as has long been the mandate for eco-activism, the artists and scholars at this Symposium look to the negative—bad feelings, strained relations, cosmic solitude, irreversible decline—to decenter human stewardship as the ethical mandate tasked by climate change.

Visual media has been pivotal to environmentalism. Images of vanishing landscapes, threatened species, and polluted environments constitute important resources in the pedagogy of environmental concern. By the same token, film arrests and estranges the forward flow of time so often connected with the urgency of environmental activism and so interrupts the connection between the visually apprehensible and the living. By turning instead to what visualization can't see, to nothingness, erasure, and absence, the speakers in the Cinema and Extinction Symposium offer both a critique of environmental care and a theory of negativity adequate to the conditions of the present.