Repair: Fall Fellows' Conference (Day 2)

Join this year's cohort of Fellows at the Society for the Humanities for presentations on the 2022-23 focal theme of Repair. Each presentation will be followed by a Q&A. Open to the public. 

Schedule for Thursday, October 20: https://events.cornell.edu/event/repair_fall_fellows_conference_day_1 

Schedule for Friday, October 21  (Day 2)

10:30am-12:00pm PANEL 2

“Obelisks and Agglomerations : Material Histories of a Shipwreck in France and New Caledonia” - Kelly Presutti (Faculty Fellow; History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell)

"(Re)Thinking Pollination at the End of All Things” - Pascal Schwaighofer (Mellon Graduate Fellow; Comparative Literature, Cornell) 

"Nest” - Susan Stabile (Society Fellow; English, Texas A&M)

Lunch Break

1:15-2:15pm PANEL 3

“QueerArch: Archiving, Exhibiting, and Transoceanic Kinship Making” - Jung Joon Lee (Society Fellow; Theory and History of Art and Design, Rhode Island School of Design) 

“The Criminalization of Communal Care Between Eritrean Refugees Migrating Through Italy”  - Carla Hung (Society Fellow; Anthropology, University of North Carolina - Asheville) 

2:30-3:30pm PANEL 4

“Affordances of Brokenness: Scrap Metal Gleaning in the Ruins of Post-Soviet Georgia” - Tamta Khalvashi (Society Fellow; Anthropology, Ilia State University)

"The Untold Story of Cornell University's Mineral Rights in Wisconsin" - Jon Parmenter (Faculty Fellow; History, Cornell University) 

4:00pm KEYNOTE

“Like Trees: On Arboreal Collectivity in Richard Powers and Zoe Leonard” - Jonathan Flatley  (English, Wayne State University)

Abstract:  This is an essay about liking trees. It argues that liking (as distinct from love) is a feeling capable of motivating collective opposition to the ongoing, catastrophic destruction of forests around the world. It makes that case through an examination of two distinct projects:  Richard Powers’s novel The Overstory and Zoe Leonard’s photographs of trees that have grown into, around, or through fences.  Both Powers and Leonard present ways to “like” trees, to affirm them, to care about and for them, to be with them, to correspond with them, to defend them, by finding ways to perceive or produce similarities between human and tree ways of being.   Most strikingly, they both suggest that the formation of a collectivity capable of defending trees involves a forest-like “surrender to cooperative existence.”