Ideas and Actions
Asynchronous Session
Artists Activating Sustainability: The Oregon Story View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Barbara Sellers-Young
Oregon is known for its unique landscape that includes the Pacific coast and Coast Range from Astoria to Brookings, the breadth of the Willamette River Valley, the beauty of the Columbia River Gorge and high land plateau, the former volcanoes of the Cascade Range, the high deserts of eastern Oregon, and the rugged Rogue River Valley. Oregon is also known for its history of environmental planning. In 1899 the Oregon legislature declared 30 miles of Oregon beach as a public highway from the Columbia River to the south line of Clatsop County. In 1913, they declared the entire coast a public highway. Throughout the 20th century, the Oregon legislature and communities throughout Oregon have placed an emphasis on land use from the role of the agricultural, timber, fishing and mining industries to the planning necessary for cities and towns. Artists Activating Sustainability: the Oregon Story considers the combination of landscape, people and social cultural ethos that influenced the development of specific literary, visual and performing arts groups across Oregon’s diverse landscape. This paper examines the way in which the artists within specific communities, against the background of landscape and history, reveal concepts that help us broaden our knowledge of what is needed to create a sustainable world. As such, each chapter considers the themes and related metaphors of participation, agency and empowerment through the lens of land, history and individual initiative.
"Poe's DIfference" View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session R.C. De Prospo
In my 2019 Poe's Difference I make the case that Poe is most profitably to be considered an anachronistic rather than a precocious author, which is not only to go against the grain of almost all past and contemporary scholarship but also to open up the possibility that the antebellum US popular culture that Poe had as a professional writer to propitiate was as late as the 1830s and 1840s exceptionally backward--in particular where human rights were concerned. I'd like to adumbrate the argument by presenting interpretations of Poe's "The Scythe of Time: A Predicament," and "Ulalume" that comprise the book's Afterword, concluding with a discussion contained in the book's Introduction of the potential literary, cultural, and historical significance of repositioning Poe as more backward- than foreword-looking.
Spoken Word, Invisible Memories: Poetic Imagery and Every Child Matters View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lorna Ramsay
We listened around imagery of our shared natural world after a summer of raging wildfires that burned through land of the T'it'q'et First Nation. I stood with my university pre-service teachers in Vancouver, British Columbia (B.C.), Turtle Island, or Canada, Autumn, 2021, and we re-watched generations of memory like ceremonial regalia rejoin the past in T'it'q'et ashes and missing children earthed around Residential Schools under x-ray revelations. My students could not feel memories buried throughout indigenous lands in the smoke and shock of hundreds of children’s graves found and announced by Chief Kukpi7 Rosanne Casimir. We absorbed earthed silence and leaned into lamentations un-silencing past and present with words, prayers, and ceremony of Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemcwe peoples. We held strongly to words from spokespersons in governments and religions, presentations of trauma and hope through artists, musicians, dancers, writers, and teachings of social justice that shared history's truths with educators and researchers. I witnessed and participated in collaborative aesthetic redesign of summer 2021 in multimodal collage of sound imagery draped by found, blank, and spoken word poetry of inquiry. My students began individual inquiry through history and poetry lessons as pathways to the conciliate silent present, to missing or murdered, for inclusive teachings as contribution to voicing B.C.’s invisible memories, colonization of First Nations people, and Every Child Matters.
Histories of Trauma in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones: A Rewriting of Collectivities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sofia Gkertzou
The Farming of Bones is fictional account of the 1937 Haitian Massacre by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo Molinas on the island of Hispaniola, which focuses on the traumatic history across the borderline of Haiti and Dominican Republic. My aim is to show how survival stories can rewrite the history of the borderline by means of creating new forms of co-existence and being-together as non-totalizable beings. To this end, I turn first to a discussion of how the disfigured bodies of the survivors undo mythologies of community-building as a homogeneous whole and testify to a reality of failed inter-ethnic relationships. Next, I examine how the remembering and retelling of survivor stories engenders a transformation of all intimate relationships namely with self, other and “home.” My point is to prove that Danticat’s disfigured victims, produce a discourse for redefining the self and allow for different forms of conviviality to emerge beyond the necessity of looking, feeling or experiencing the same. For theoretical support, I turned mainly to Julia Kristeva’s concept of “intimate revolt,” as well as Frances Restuccia’s work on the “unsharability” of pain. Overall, this paper undermines the presupposed existence of intimacy and togetherness in the victims’ lives and emphasizes the proliferation of individual stories of pain that rewrite the entire history of the borderline and its communities through the prism of precariousness and contingency.
How Art as a Vehicle for Ideas-based Ideologies Can Facilitate the Understanding of Climate Change and Help People Explore a Speculative and Sustainable Future View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Wenwen Liu
Climate change is impacting on all aspects of contemporary life. Many artists provide a compelling vision for speculative futures awakening a creative consciousness using imagined worldviews. This paper presents my practice-based research that aims to establish how visual art can engage with issues-based concepts and ideologies through presentation, re-presentation, and interpretation as a framework for engaging with issues of climate change and realigning society to sustainable futures. This paper takes theory and artistic practice as methods to respond to themes and issues of climate change. In the context of practical research, the arts-based approach and art theory research alternate between planning, theoretical research, practical action, reflection, and evaluation. Through digital art, this study creates a discursive space that relates to daily life, where people can deeply understand the interconnecting relationships between humans and the planet; simultaneously, it also shows people an achievable ecological future and encourages people to think and find an existence conducive to all. This existence is not the present, but a possibility for human beings to explore the future through the reshaping and reimagining of the present.
