The “(Re)thinking Landscape: Ways of knowing / Ways of being” symposium is scheduled to take place in person at Yale University from September 29 to October 1, 2022. This interdisciplinary, multi-day event hosted by the Environmental Humanities program brings together a distinguished group of artists, activists, and scholars working at the convergence of landscape, representation, and the politics of land. If landscape studies have traditionally focused on questions of representation and cultural imaginaries, how does taking land seriously as a category prompt a rethinking of landscape? This international conference works from the premise that we are inhabitants, stewards, and architects of landscape and that we have a responsibility to think critically about the role of landscape. Land and landscape are a point of entry to reckon with how colonial, nationalist, heteronormative, and white supremacist systems and structures impose themselves on land, waters, and communities. At the same time, material engagements with land, as well as symbolic representations of landscape are powerful tools for creating meaning and shaping ethics. Through a cross-disciplinary dialogue across the humanities and social sciences, this conference addresses the meanings of landscape in the context of the very material politics of the present.
The conference includes panels that are open to the public, two keynote lectures, a film screening, and workshops with artists.
Keynote Events:
Thursday, September 29: Screening of Logos Zanzotto (2021, Italy, dir. Denis Brotto)
Friday, September 30: Nick Estes (University of Minnesota)
Saturday, October 1: Tiffany Lethabo King (University of Virginia)
Supported by:
The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund
The Yale Environmental Humanities Program
The Whitney Center for Humanities at Yale
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
The Yale University Art Gallery
The Yale Group for the Study of Native America
The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History
The Yale Department of the History of Art
The Yale Department of Italian Studies
The Yale Film and Media Studies Program