Cogut Institute for the Humanities
Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown

In the Dissolution: Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness Summer Workshop

In the Dissolution: Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness Summer Workshop

Directed by Macarena Gómez-Barris (Brown University) and Michaeline Crichlow (Duke University) | May 27 – June 1, 2025 | Location: Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University

The Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown (CEHAB) at the Cogut Institute is pleased to announce this year’s Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness Summer Workshop called “In the Dissolution” to refer to the unraveling and dissolving of the colonial paradigm toward other ways of organizing life on the planet. This will be the second iteration of the CCDGB Workshop, which was hosted last year by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University.

The workshop seeks to address climate change and its accompanying disasters as co-constitutive outcomes of the ongoing project of racial capital and toxic modernity. Climate change is inextricably bound to material and epistemological violences produced by Western colonial powers’ global conquest, African enslavement, and Indigenous dispossession. Land, territories, communities, and the human and more-than-human ecologies have been casualties of this enterprise and need therefore to be studied in their varied articulations, planetary relationalities, and “deep implicancy” (Ferreira da Silva). 

Within and beyond the paradigm of extraction, the workshop considers what it means to extend a tidalectic (Brathwaite), entangled, non-extractive (Gómez-Barris), decolonial, queer and trans* creative, and transversal approach to knowledge production that endures the fracturing of the liberal humanist imaginary. 

We build from the insights of the Elemental Media Conference held at Brown University in October 2024 to consider how scholarship, art, performance, theory, and praxis all collide in the work of imagining beyond of the logics of anti-blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and colonial binarisms. 

  1. How might we understand the climate emergency as part of the same war as racial capitalism?

  2.  Given the effects of Climate Change and the global rise of authoritarianism, how can we grasp the tenuous work of decolonization?

  3. How can local, existent, emergent politics and creative practices respond to present planetary disorder?

  4. How do we grasp temporality and its spatial correlates through analytics of the elements of air, water, fire, earth and more? 

  5. How can critical pedagogy adapt in order to address creatively and transdisciplinarily the entanglement of the workshop’s animating concerns to better grasp the stakes of contemporary Climate Change concerns and accelerations? 

  6. How do we decenter the Human, without falling into the trap of imposing anthropocentric agency on the more- than-human?

We anticipate conversations among invited scholars and accepted graduate students that will seek to further explore articulations of the workshop’s animating concerns. Participants will be expected to read from texts representing the humanities, interpretative social sciences, and various visual and artistic media. 

At the end of the workshop, participants will develop prospective research projects as well as syllabi that evolve from their reflections on the workshop’s themes of inquiry. It is hoped that the project will form a pedagogical node in a network of similar projects already extant and forthcoming in the world.

Format

A six-day workshop taking place at Brown University beginning on Tuesday, May 27th with Duke participants arriving no later than that morning to be in-residence in Providence through Sunday, June 1, 2025 with departures possible that evening. The workshop will involve daily seminars co-facilitated by graduate students and faculty, presentations of faculty and graduate student research and work, and evening programing, along with opening and closing events on Tuesday and Sunday. 

Participation and Eligibility

Directed by Macarena Gómez-Barris (Brown University) and Michaeline Crichlow (Duke University), the workshop will involve 10 graduate students from Duke and Brown alongside core faculty members Anny-Dominique Curtius (University of Iowa), Denise Ferreira da Silva (New York University), Leila Lehnen (Brown), and madison moore (Brown) and short visits from Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Jayna Brown (Brown) and Alexander Weheliye (Brown). Duke University doctoral students will receive travel and accommodations. 

Applications

Applications are closed. Brown and Duke graduate students should submit a letter of interest (maximum 3 pages) and an abbreviated CV of two pages maximum. Each student must submit an individual application. 

Please include the following information in the letter of interest:

  • A statement of purpose including an outline of how your research engages with and contributes to the workshop’s themes of inquiry.

  • A brief pedagogical outline describing how you might organize a single seminar session (i.e., concepts, key words, format/activity, a specific media object, etc.).

  • A brief abstract of a relevant project that you would present during the workshop for feedback and development. Creative projects are welcome in this space. 

Apply 

Enquiries concerning the workshop or application process should be directed to the workshop’s Graduate Coordinator, Isaac Essex at environmental-humanities@brown.edu.

Banner image: Algarium: Bosques Submarinos, de María Luisa Donoso Fernández