This is a busy week of lectures on the Clark campus, with talks on topics ranging from weather modification to trans history, reproductive rights, and workforce integration for refugees.
Tuesday, March 19
Global Geographies of Weather Modification in an Era of Climate Change, 4-5:30 p.m., Higgins Lounge, Dana Commons
Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Emily Yeh, professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, will be on campus March 18 and 19 to teach several classes as well as give a public lecture, “Global Geographies of Weather Modification in an Era of Climate Change.” Despite the importance of weather modification in the context of climate change, it has not attracted much recent attention from social scientists. Yeh will provide a wide-ranging and hopefully fun overview of weather modification in the U.S., China, and the United Arab Emirates through a geographical lens.
Emily Yeh conducts research on nature-society relations in Tibetan parts of the PRC, including projects on conflicts over access to natural resources, the relationship between ideologies of nature and nation, the political ecology of pastoral environment and development policies, vulnerability of Tibetan herders to climate change, and emerging environmental subjectivities. Her book “Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development” (Cornell University Press, 2013), which explores the intersection of political economy and cultural politics of development as a project of state territorialization, was awarded the 2015 E. Gene Smith Prize for best book on Inner Asia from the Association of Asian Studies. It was also named a “best book of 2014” by Foreign Affairs for the Asia/Pacific region.
Yeh’s lecture is sponsored by Clark University Phi Beta Kappa, the Office of the President, Graduate School of Geography, A new Earth conversation, the Department of Sustainability and Social Justice, the Asian Studies Program, and the George Perkins Marsh Institute
What Transpires Now: Trans History in the Present, 5-6:30 p.m., Jefferson 320
Also Tuesday, trans history scholar Susan Stryker will meet with students and then deliver an address, “What Transpires Now: Trans History in the Present.” In this talk drawn from her work in progress, “Changing Gender,” Stryker highlights resonances between contemporary controversies over transgender issues and similar ones in the past, to situate the targeting of trans lives today in the long arc of modern history. What’s needed now, she argues, is not a narrow movement to secure the rights of a vulnerable minority, but rather a broader transformation of practices and systems through which we articulate the relationship between self-sense, embodied existence, social categorization, physical environments, and our sense of the ultimate nature of reality — that is, we need to change gender itself.
Stryker is the author of “Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution”; co-director of the Emmy-winning documentary film “Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria”; co-editor of the multi-volume Transgender Studies readers; and was founding executive co-editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. A collection of her essays, “When Monsters Speak,” edited by McKenzie Wark, will be published next year by Duke University Press.
Stryker’s talk is sponsored by the Provost, Dean of the College, and Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs as well as the Women’s and Gender Studies program, departments of History, Visual and Performing Arts, Sociology, and Political Science, and the Writing Center.
Wednesday, March 20
This semester, the Belonging Talks speaker series will explore economic sustainability for refugee-inclusive communities. In this event, Lourena Gboeah, program director of Upwardly Global, will speak on working with employers to improve access to the workforce for refugees. The session will be moderated by Jeff Turgeon, Executive Director of MassHire Central Region Workforce Board.
This Belonging Talks session, sponsored by the Integration and Belonging Hub in the Department of Sustainability and Social Justice, will take place via Zoom.
Kathryn Abrams, Herma Hill Kay Distinguished Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Center for Reproductive Rights and Justice at the UC Berkeley School of Law, will examine how organizers are confronting post-Roe restrictions on reproductive rights.
Abrams has taught at the law schools at Boston University, Indiana University-Bloomington, Harvard University and Northwestern University. Most recently, she was Professor of Law and Associate Professor of Ethics and Public Life at Cornell University. While at Cornell, she served as Director of the Women’s Studies Program, and won several awards for teaching and for service to women. She joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2001.
Abrams has explored questions of employment discrimination, minority vote dilution, campaign finance, constitutional law, and law and the emotions, but it has focused most centrally on feminist jurisprudence. Within this area, Abrams has written on feminist methodology and epistemology, the jurisprudence of sexual harassment, and cultural and theoretical constructions of women’s agency.
Abrams’ talk is sponsored by the Higgins School of Humanities in conjunction with Menstrual Equity Alliance and Pro-Choice Clark as part of Clark University’s celebration of Women’s History Month. All attendees are encouraged to bring donations of menstrual products, which will be distributed by Menstrual Equity Alliance to outreach organizations in the greater Worcester community.
The Challenge of Managing Guyana’s Oil and Gas Industry, 4:30-5:30 p.m., Jefferson 218
Extractives@Clark presents a talk by Dr. Lomarsh Roopnarine, professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at Jackson State University, who has been researching the contentious development of one of the most important new oil fields in the Western Hemisphere.
In 2015, ExxonMobil announced a series of significant offshore oil discoveries turning the tiny Caribbean nation of less than one million inhabitants into the next petro-state. With no previous experience in the oil sector, the Guyanese government must keep up with the country’s booming oil production. Can Guyana find a way adequately manage the financial windfall and beat the Resource Curse?
