Researchers studying climate disinformation agree: “Inoculation” is one of the most effective options for countering it, and the first step toward inoculation is “pre-bunking,” or warning audiences in advance.

In this press briefing, co-sponsored by Covering Climate Now and Climate Action Against Disinformation, experts will look at how journalists can get ahead of and “pre-bunk” climate disinformation in a way that doesn’t amplify it or cause unnecessary alarm.

Join Thursday, April 11, at 11am US Eastern Time, for a one-hour conversation moderated by investigative climate journalist Amy Westervelt, about how to pre-bunk climate disinformation and help inoculate your audiences.

PANELISTS:

• Ketan Joshi, Communications consultant & author

• Phil Newell, Director of Science Defense, Climate Nexus

• Dharna Noor, Fossil Fuels and Climate Reporter, The Guardian

In our conversation, Brenda walked me through the narrative of her work as it’s evolved over the years. She started with an interest in human rights humanities scholarship where she was particularly drawn to the later writings of Adrienne Rich on accountable citizenship. Eventually, Rich’s ideas pushed Brenda to consider what these issues looked like in the Canadian context, which led her to Indigenous writers and knowledge keepers. Her work today is guided by the question of how to live responsibly according to treaty and territorial relationships as understood by indigenous peoples.

One figure whom Brenda sees as a mentor in engaging with this question is Coast Salish based poet and water justice worker, Rita Wong. Working with and responding to Wong’s work on water and waterways has pushed Brenda into thinking about what she called “the porosity of the self” and relational conceptions of intersubjectivity in Indigenous teachings. Her current research aims to take up some of Wong’s work in beholden and undercurrent as a kind of guide for a project investigating the relations and communities along the Kitchissippi Kichi Zibi watershed.

She described the evolution of her work as continually picking up the strands of past projects and pulling them through into new interests and contexts. Recently, she was able to bring these strands together to teach her dream course last fall, called Literary Ecological Fieldwork. This class cut down on assigned readings and asked students to spend time each week outside. They kept fieldwork journals to record their observations and reflections in a given space, while each week the course reading materials focused on paying attention to a specific aspect of the world – sometimes it was the trees of their neighbourhood, sometimes wild bee populations. The course tied into Brenda’s love of interdisciplinary thinking and brought Indigenous knowledge keepers, scientists and literary artists into conversation with one another. Many of these conversations happened in the classroom space itself, through a range of guest speakers who appeared throughout the term—including, at the invitation of her students, Rita Wong.

Brenda designed this course with the experimental premise that, “if you invite students to become more engaged with the … multi-storied minutia of where they live, … their sense of relational responsibility, which ties into relational responsibilities on treaty terms—to the where they live—would then … provide an anchor to the bigger questions of climate change which can still seem remote.”

Much of climate change education is focused on pushing students to think systemically rather than individually about what’s happening to our planet, but Brenda feels that this artificial binary is harmful to both her students and the topic at hand. Intervening in climate change requires both perspectives, but “criticality,” as the sole lens, she told me, “privileges the rational. It doesn’t engage with the spiritual, emotional, [or] physical.” In response, her teaching focuses on embodied learning. The students in her class last fall commented on the mental health benefits of being asked to spend time outside every week, just being present and paying attention to the world around them. This is a part of a decolonial, indigenous pedagogy that requires us to engage with whole persons. Brenda explained that “in Indigenous conceptions of personhood, a person is never individual, solely, it’s [all about] relation.” This was what made her class last fall so special, because “so much of [their] learning was about the relational construction of living entities, which we are part of as biological beings.”

When I asked Brenda what she felt was most effective way of reaching people regarding climate action, she told me that this work is “incremental” and that the small conversations in classrooms really matter. Whether it be discussions about climate change or Indigenous issues, she’s found that students take these conversations from class and bring them back to their families, their roommates, and the people in their lives in a kind of co-education effect. “I still believe that educational settings have a great capacity to create critical sensibility and engagement on the part, not only of the students in our classrooms, but potentially, gradually, a broader public.”

Brenda is currently accepting students for supervisory projects and hopes to have the chance to teach her Literary Ecological Fieldwork course again soon.

Some Recommended Readings:

• Fred Wah and Rita Wong, , 2018
• Rita Wong, , 2015
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, , 2013
• Adrienne Rich, Your Native Land, Your Life, 1986

Interview written and conducted by Veronika Kratz

Sabrina Peric (Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary) is a visiting scholar at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University from the University of Calgary. Her visit on March 21 and 22, 2019 focused on issues related to the anthropology of climate change, her research, and ways to integrate climate change into teaching. When discussing the goals of the talk and her work, Peric described it as an opportunity to “get together with faculty and students to talk about how we can teach climate change since it is not only a newer pedagogical topic, but something that’s garnering more demand from students and faculty.” Her discussion focused on the opportunities and challenges that the topic of climate change and decolonization in Canada presents today. “Specifically, the way that land has been treated in a colonial context,” she says, “and, what it means to move out of that colonial context, whether it’s possible, and what possibilities there are of building new relationships with our indigenous neighbors, including what role this can play in action against climate change.”

Discussing how social inequalities influence the ways climate change is addressed, Peric stresses the huge implications they have. For her, it’s the basis of understanding how energy systems affect people on a daily basis and how energy is impacting us. Within Canada, the issue of decolonization and “understanding Canada as a settler state that has exploited many of the resources across the country” are essential in addressing the central issues of climate change. Due to the difference in lived experience and how climate change is addressed, she mentions research into energy and climate change should focus on the local level as opposed to the national level. Peric believes energy stories from individuals, their own narratives, are “powerful and very revelatory” as energy infrastructure are unequal, and not everyone has an equal voice in deciding how to move forward with energy in the future. “I think that precisely by focusing on people’s individual energy stories we can get to the roots of some of these bigger questions.” Peric, as a scholar, feels a responsibility to engage with communities across the country on these broader discussions of energy and climate change considering the current climate (i.e. questions surrounding the Trans Mountain pipeline and climate change). For her, addressing the issues of reformulating relationships to the land means addressing the broader decolonization process, acknowledging that it is still ongoing, and it has been affecting indigenous people for many centuries – and, equally critically, the environment. Peric views humanities and social sciences as playing a critical role in understanding and reformulating this relationship: “I don’t think our roots to solving climate change are technological, I think they are deeply social, and … deeply political”.

The Energy In Society (E I S) research group was formulated specifically to recognize energy transition as a social and political problem. Peric formed this group with her colleagues Dr. Petra Dolata, in history, and Dr. Roberta Rice, in political science, at the University of Calgary. They are interested in creating at the University of Calgary a community of energy scholars – people who look at broader issues of energy at the University of Calgary –, to work on new research collaborations. The University of Calgary is generally seen as a university that does a lot of energy research on the natural sciences. Peric and her colleagues were aware of humanities and social sciences scholars who were doing work on the question of energy futures and transitions but had no forum within which to get together. The E I S research group was created to bring these people together. Over the past couple of years, they’ve been working on collaborative research projects, have run speaker’s series, and public events for the broader Calgary community to bring recognition to the real social effects that energy has on our daily lives. Peric, Dolata, and Rice are interested in these broader issues of science and governance as energy has a very daily, tangible effect on people’s lives. “Generally, there has been a great burden – and also opportunity – put on the natural sciences to be some technological fix … [but] we recognize that there is a massive role for the humanities and social sciences to play here.”

Interview Conducted by Anne Cynthia Kazora

(Human Rights and ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Climate Commons practicum student, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University)

Below are a few recommended readings by Dr. Sabrina Peric:

Coulthard, G. S., 1974 (2014). Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Cruikshank, J. (2005). Do glaciers listen?: Local knowledge, colonial encounters, and social imagination. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge.

Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou is a visiting scholar at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ from École des hautes ĂŠtudes en sciences sociales in Paris. She is visiting for the fall with ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Climate Commons and the Institute for the Comparative Study of Literature, Art, and Culture. During this time she’s facilitating a workshop, “On Waste and Time,” which discusses waste, its temporal effects and the influence that time has in our perception of waste. I sat down to talk with her about her research and what she’s up to at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ in the coming weeks.

Discussing her in-progress dissertation research, Mavrokordopoulou describes her work as looking at “artistic and cultural responses that seek to make tangible or confront the notion of deep time.” This realization of the age of the Earth represents “a shift in our perception of time,” which Mavrokordopoulou connects to current discussions surrounding the Anthropocene as a geological epoch – another perspective on time. Mavrokordopoulou is trained in art history, and so her work centres on various works of art which “look at how these perceptions of the deep past of the Earth are projected into the deep future in the context of climate change”. She is particularly interested in tracing how contemporary artists extend the time of the realisation of the work, rendering the artistic process beyond human control.

Currently in the third year of her PhD program, Mavrokordopoulou is writing the first section of her dissertation, which serves as the focus for the “On Waste and Time” workshop. In this area of her research, she’s looking at markers for deep geological disposal sites, which house high-level radioactive waste. These markers are an attempt to address the danger of nuclear waste, which remains toxic for billions of years, in human temporalities by building a kind of warning sign for the disposal sites.

One such marker is Testbed, a land art project proposal created in 2018 by Tei Carpenter. Through its use of air capture farms, Testbed “develops through time as a new material formation, like a sculpture in the making.” Testbed is composed of the build up of interactions between surrounding minerals at the site and CO2 to create a sculpture. Mavrokordopoulou explains that it actually uses CO2, another toxic matter like the nuclear waste, in a way that “doubles the disturbance” of the area. Mavrokordopoulou also makes it clear that her goal isn’t to “evaluate these works from a technological point of view,” or their effectiveness in warning against toxicity over time. Instead, she looks at the ideas around time and materiality that are opened by these works. For example, she points to the potential “blurring of the boundaries between human-made and nature-made, which is precisely what’s happening in a nuclear waste storage space.”

In coming to ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, Mavrokordopoulou is excited to work with other people interested in climate change research and how climate concerns are influencing scholarship across the humanities. That’s why, in facilitating her workshop, she hopes to explore the interdisciplinary application and impact of climate change into the manifestations of nuclear temporality and deep time—a conversation which opens up in her research. “It’s a topic that can bring people from very different fields,” she says, reaching those even outside of the university, such as those working in or involved with policy or activism. “I’m really interested in gathering these different people around the same table to discuss a topic that concerns us all in different ways.”

Mavrokordopoulou also hopes to highlight current work on waste being done at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, such as the happening at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ October 26-27^th, which focuses on the relationship between architecture and heritage conservation and waste, demolition, and salvage. In fact, the next meeting of the workshop will centre on questioning architectural ruins as waste and their complex temporalities.

The “On Waste and Time” workshop is open to all, with three remaining sessions on October 4^th, 18^th, and November 3^rd, to be held from 3-4:30PM in St. Patricks room 201D. Please email Mavrokordopoulou at kyveli.mavrokordopoulou@ehess.fr for access to the reading materials and to join what promises to be an intriguing—and important—conversation.