The Transdisciplinarity of Climate Change, Migration, and Land-Based Ethics
Seminar Leaders
Ralph Cintron, University of Illinois Chicago
Michelle Hall Kells, University of New Mexico
Donnie J. Sackey, University of Texas at Austin
The peoples of the world may be at a remarkable juncture. On the one hand, climate scientists are predicting catastrophic disruptions to our food systems, our built environment, and the ability of nation-states to adapt to internal and external migrations. On the other hand, such impending calamities may also drive remarkable innovations in terms of technology, political/economic/legal institutions, and even our epistemological/ontological/cosmological presumptions. This seminar will engage some of these discussions.
Our co-leaders are transdisciplinary scholars of rhetoric: from the anthropology of democracies; to science studies; to local policy-making; to environmental rhetorics and extraction industries; to technical communication; to race studies. More significantly, however, we will be inviting scholars with different disciplinary formations such as climate science, migration studies, philosophy, indigenous scholarship, and so on. One of our goals will be to bridge across this siloed knowledge and explore emerging theories of rhetoric.
Our seminar will form four workshop groups of 7-8 seminarians. The groups will shift among themselves and across the four co-leaders. A typical day will consist first of engaging over zoom (more than likely) one or more invited speakers. Later that day in our workshops we will translate the speakers’ words and arguments into a steadily expanding set of heuristics that will be useful to the individual projects of the seminarians and for rhetorical theory in general. Before the start of the seminar the leaders will provide an evolving bibliography of their own and others relevant work. Given the flow of the discussions during the seminar, some of this bibliography may be collectively discussed. The end product of the seminar will be the improvement of our collective thinking (seminarians and co-leaders both). Such improvement might be recorded in the form of a redrafted dissertation proposal, a dissertation chapter, an article, and so on. In taking seriously the phrase “Poieses of the Future” we fully expect that our collaborative discussions and drafts during the seminar will continue beyond the end of the institute in much the same way that the peoples of the world will continue negotiating the (dis)juncture(s) of climate change.
Note: This seminar is not available for remote participation.
Ralph Cintrón is a professor of English and recent interim director of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a former Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, honorable mention winner for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing from the American Anthropological Association, and was recently elected as a Fellow to the Rhetoric Society of America. He is the author of Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday as well as Democracy as Fetish. He is also the co-editor of Culture, Catastrophe + Rhetoric and Co-Pi of 60 Years of Migration: Puerto Ricans in Chicagoland. He is currently writing with a philosopher Volatilities and the End(s) of Sovereignty, a text about planetary heating inside modernity’s political economy.
Donnie Johnson Sackey is an assistant professor of rhetoric & writing at The University of Texas at Austin. His research centers on the dynamics of environmental public policy deliberation, environmental justice, and environmental cultural history. His research has previously been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Institute for Population Studies, Health Assessment, Administration, Services and Economics, and the Center for Urban Responses to Environmental Stressors. He previously served on the board of the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition and as a senior researcher with Detroit Integrated Vision for Environmental Research through Science and Engage (Dverse).
Michelle Hall Kells is Associate Professor in Rhetoric and Writing at the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies where she serves as the Director of Graduate Studies. Kells teaches courses in Chicana/o civil rights and environmental justice as well as ethnolinguistic diversity and language equality education. Kells coordinated the Writing Across Communities initiative at the University of New Mexico 2004-2014 promoting linguistic diversity in literacy education across academic, civic, and professional communities, available at: https://sites.google.com/site/resourcewac/
She currently serves as the Translingual Literacy Studies Coordinator at the University of New Mexico, available at: https://translingualliteracy.org/ Kells served as the principle investigator for the grant supported research study Salt of the Earth Recovery Project in 2018-2020 examining Cold War labor organization of Local 890 in Grant County, New Mexico available at: https://saltoftheearthrecoveryproject.wordpress.com/history-of-the-salt-of-the-earth/
Kells was the principal investigator for the 2020-2021 for Center for Regional Studies grant-supported research study on environmental impacts of COVID-19 and climate change in New Mexico in collaboration with Levi Romero (New Mexico State Poet Laureate 2020-2022). Mi Cultura Cura/Healing through Culture: Testimonios de la Nueva México applies an ethno-poetic perspective to examining the public health and environmental impacts of COVID-19 pandemic and climate change on New Mexico communities, available at: https://www.miculturacura.org/projects
Kells has published more than thirty articles and chapters focusing on rhetoric and ecology, transcultural literacy, and Cold War Mexican American civil rights activism. Kells’ two single author monographs include Héctor P. García: Everyday Rhetoric and Mexican American Civil Rights (2006) and Vicente Ximenes, LBJ’s Great Society, and Mexican American Civil Rights Rhetoric (2018). Her collaborative publications include a co-edited volume with Laura Gonzales, Latina Leadership: Language and Literacy Education Across Communities (2022). Kells was lead editor for Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity, and Literacy Education with Valerie Balester and Victor Villanueva (2004) and Attending to the Margin: Writing, Researching and Teaching on the Front Lines (1999). Kells is currently working on a new monograph, Rhetoric of Embodiment: Mujerista Activism, Environmental Imagination, and the Mining of the Salt of the Earth.