From the Director
It has been an honor to direct the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown (CEHAB) for a second year. CEHAB continues to be an emergent space responding to the urgent need for research and pedagogy on the more-than-human world and the unfolding planetary environmental crises. With a livable future in mind, we organized programming, study groups, and courses to forge a rich and biodiverse intellectual and artistic community.
To begin our second year of programming, we hosted a panel discussion with scholar Melanie Yazzie and artist Will Wilson titled “Navajo Territorial Recuperations.” In line with our collaborative praxis, we also co-sponsored a variety of events throughout the year, including the talk and screening “Beyond the National Frame: Scenes from the Indo-Pak Border” with anthropologist Natasha Raheja (Cornell University) and a conversation with journalist Joseph Lee titled “Nothing More of This Land.”
In April 2026, we held a two-day conference on “Extractive Zones in the Digital Age,” a convening of scholars, artists, and community members to address the intensification of extractivism globally, including an online international panel that addressed mining, data mining, data centers, artificial intelligence, and extractive infrastructures. Vanessa Agard-Jones (Anthropology | Columbia University) gave a brilliant keynote, “Ground Wars,” which focused on the submerged perspectives from the soil and directed our attention to the plantation as one of the original planetary extractive zones. Another highlight was the ice work of artist Teresa Borasino, who offered an extraordinary performance and a conversation with elders Vito Calderon and Yolanda Quispe on melting glaciers and uranium mining in the Southern Andes. We also kicked off two new graduate study groups: “Queer and Trans* Ecologies” and “Extractivisms,” which will be run by students in 2026–27.
