Reframing the Conversation Surrounding Climate Change

In collaboration with The Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown (CEHAB) at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI) is continuing a summer workshop aimed at recontextualizing the conversation of climate change to better understand its present impact.

Titled “In the Dissolution: Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness” (CCDGB), the workshop comes from the joint efforts of Michaeline Crichlow, Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke, and Macarena Gómez-Barris, Director of the Center for Environmental Humanities, and seeks to interrogate the ideological assumptions guiding and underpinning projects of development and expansion. 

Participants of last year’s inaugural workshop included graduate student researchers from both universities and illustrated the cross-institutional aspirations of the humanities and sciences. At its core, the CCDGB workshops address climate change and its accompanying disasters as “co-constitutive outcomes of the ongoing project of racial capital and toxic modernity.”

As part of its speaker series last year, the CCDGB lab hosted Gabriela Valdivia, a scholar from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, on her work about “Amazonian self-determination and radical solidarity in time of extractive research.”

Valdivia's lecture explored the intersection of capitalism, resource extraction, and Indigenous communities in Latin America, specifically in the Ecuadorian Amazon. She critically examined the dominant narratives around resource extraction and the harm it causes to Indigenous peoples, arguing that these stories often focus solely on the atrocities of extraction, neglecting the concurrent efforts of Indigenous communities for self-determination and healing. 

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Through this series, Valdivia was able to communicate the importance of “companion narratives” that highlight Indigenous resilience and the diverse forms of political consciousness that emerge within these communities, even amidst the destructive forces of resource extraction.

The CCDGB lab, workshop, and speaker series are also integral parts of The Entanglements Project at FHI that views climate justice from the point of view of historical fault lines, even as we understand and articulate the need for immediate support for those lives and habitats in immediate danger.

Elly Veloria, a third year PhD student in the Cultural Anthropology Department, was initially drawn to the workshop for its intersections with her own research interests. 

“I was genuinely excited to work with Dr. Crichlow through the [CCDGB] workshop,” Veloria shared. “There was also the prospect of working with so many brilliant scholars whose work intersects with my research interests as well.” 

In attendance for last year’s workshop was author Alex Weheliye, Malcolm S. Forbes Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, Anny-Dominique Curtius, Professor of Francophone Studies at the University of Iowa, and Denise Ferreira da Silva, an anti-colonial Black feminist philosopher.

Veloria’s work focuses on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico and investigates the longstanding environmental impact of nuclear weapons following the occupation of the U.S. Navy on the island. “The workshop had an incredible combination of researchers and artists,” she said. 

“The environmental focus was helpful as well—seeing that crucial ecological dimension applied to the humanities and social sciences offered a unique interdisciplinary perspective.”

Jessica Doyle, a sixth year PhD candidate in the Romance Studies Department, says participating in the workshop came by way of an important working relationship she built with Crichlow. 

“The conversations participants put forward were very rich and nuanced,” Doyle said. “And people there came from across academia, like Caribbean artists and photographers, all of whom brought these really important research perspectives.”

Doyle’s work has focused primarily on the transformation of political ideologies in Brazil as a result of social movements, the impact of environmentalism, and local culture. Coming to Duke and also participating in the CCDGB workshop helped bring additional context to the cultural elements of her work. 

“All of these issues that I was seeing specifically through my research, like issues about the Anthropocene, were quite influenced by my time here in the Romance Studies department and through working with Dr. Crichlow,” Doyle explained. 

Through CCDGB workshops, the aim is still to engage participants in transdisciplinary conversations on climate justice, decolonization, and ecological relationalities, considering how creative and scholarly practices can challenge racial and colonial logics. 

And the aim is to develop innovative research and pedagogical approaches to these interconnected global crises. This year, participants will engage in seminars, research presentations, and creative discussions on topics like the connection between racial capitalism and climate emergency, decolonization in the face of global crises, and the role of the more-than-human world. 

Participants will also design research projects and pedagogical plans related to these themes. The six-day workshop fosters transdisciplinary scholarship, art, and performance to imagine alternative futures beyond colonial structures.