Media@McGill’s international colloquium asks leading scholars in the humanities and social sciences to spell out a new research agenda for climate theory and aesthetics in the age of the Anthropocene. How is realism—in both the aesthetic history of representation and the philosophical tradition that underwrites it—transformed by contending with our new experience of climate in the Anthropocene? In order to temper climate change—to apprehend its complexity, to address its short and long term consequences, to mitigate its many sources—Climate Realism boldly claims that we must develop new aesthetic theories and projects.

Guest speakers

  • Pierre Bélanger (Harvard University)
    Title coming soon
  • Amanda Boetzkes (University of Guelph)
    “Ecological Postures For a Climate Realism”
  • Ingrid Diran (Pacific Northwest College of Art) and Antoine Traisnel (University of Michigan)
    “Climate Change, Natural History, and the Extinction of Dialectical Thought”
  • Anne-Lise François (University of California at Berkeley)
    “Flowers of a Day: Margins, Reserves, Climate Change”
  • Barbara Herrnstein Smith (Duke University)
    “Perplexing Realities: Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene”
  • Graeme Macdonald (University of Warwick)
    “‘The New Oil Reality’, or Petroleum’s Returning Monsters”
  • Alessandra Ponte (Université de Montréal)
    “Governing Climate”
  • Nicole Starosielski (New York University)
    “Thermal Vision”
  • Michelle Ty (Clemson University)
    “Realism’s Phantom Subjects”
  • Kyle Powys Whyte (Michigan State University)
    “Indigenizing the Time, Memory and History of Climate Change”
  • Kathryn Yusoff (Queen Mary University London)
    “Geologic Realism: Epochal Thoughts and the Terminal Beach of Geologic Time”

Media@McGill is a hub of research, scholarship and public outreach on issues and controversies in media, technology and culture, whose activities are supported by the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation.

www.media.mcgill.ca

Media@McGill Colloquium Partners: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; McGill UniversityDean of Arts Development Fund, Grierson Chair in Communication Studies, James McGill Chair in Culture and Technology, James McGill Chair in Contemporary Art History, William Dawson Scholar of Feminist Media Studies, Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy, McGill School of Environment, Institute for the Public Life of Art and Ideas (IPLAI); Media History Research Centre, Concordia University; Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies, University of Alberta