Project Title- لأولئك الذين سوف ينظرون إلى ترابنا: For those who will behold our soil. 

Bio:

I am a sculptor and social artist. Throughout my life, I have been intrigued by the concept of Liberation and its absence in everyday personal situations. I have explored this topic through various mediums, such as social practice,   sculpture, and sound, and have come to realize how these personal situations are closely linked to larger societal issues. As a woman growing up in the Islamic Republic of Iran, I tried to understand the systems that produce inequity and conflict. However, the more I delved into this complex topic, the more I understood how it is deeply connected to issues such as oil, carbon democracy, and racial geography. My interest lies in utilizing these connections and exploring blind spots that may exist within these narratives.

My current projects delve into topics that have significantly shaped my life - oil and resistance. These subjects, while frequently discussed in the media, often overlook crucial aspects such as racial dynamics, the role of women and minorities, environmental narratives, and the distinct beneficiaries and bearers of its costs. 

This project began as an exploration of how soil can come to be contaminated. Ruined soil, saturated with oil and petrochemicals, serves as a tangible emblem of how a racialized people who live and depend on that soil have their possibilities for flourishing annihilated. As the project developed, I planned a photo, sound, and data installation that explores soil contamination through the lens of “The Conference of the Birds” by Attar, a 12th-century Sufi and poet.

Here is how the story unfolds : 

“The Conference of the Birds" by Attar is an allegorical poem about birds seeking the mythical Simorgh to be their king. Guided by the hoopoe, they journey through seven valleys representing stages of the Sufi path to enlightenment. As the birds face hardships and many perish along the way, they learn about themselves and the nature of their quest. Only thirty birds survive to reach the dwelling of the Simorgh. There, they realize a profound truth: "Simorgh" in Persian means "thirty birds," and it is in their unity and reflection that they find the Simorgh. The story concludes with the birds understanding that the Simorgh they sought is, metaphorically, within themselves; their journey was a process of self-discovery and realization of their own divine nature. This tale is a profound exploration of the soul's journey toward God and the discovery that the divine is within oneself.

Inspired by this story,  this project investigates my connection with soil through engagement with community-led soil and water cleanup initiatives. It focuses on documenting the efforts of thirty individuals involved in environmental restoration projects near our city, including scientists, whistle-blowers, and community leaders.

Project Title- Carbon Permanence

Hans Baumann is a Swiss-American artist, designer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles.

His work reflects upon ecological collapse, the dynamics of climate change, and the materiality of energy practices. His essays and projects have appeared in a variety of publications, including e-flux architecture, The Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land and the Politics of Environment (University of California Press) and Accumulation: The Art, Architecture, and Media of Climate Change (University of Minnesota Press), and his work has been supported by institutions such as the Getty Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and Sandbox Films.

Baumann holds degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Prifysgol Caerdydd, and he has lectured throughout the United States and Europe at institutions such as Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), University of Pennsylvania, Universität Bern and Cornell University. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) and at ArtCenter College of Design’s Media Design Practices Department, he is a Fellow of the Landscape Architecture Foundation, a Fulbright U.S. Scholar and is a 2024-2025 Fellow of the Howard Foundation at Brown University.

Project Title- Euphoric Proof: Bacterial Melanin Sculptures

Bio:

Lucy Kim is a visual artist exploring the many naturalizing mechanisms that structure day-to-day visual experiences. Her practice is aesthetically and materially wide-ranging, where her focus is on developing forms that are visceral, tactile, and less vision-centric. Using a broad range of materials such as oil paint, silicone rubbers, resins, and live bacteria cells, she makes work as a way to understand and challenge ocular and photographic authority, and the many socio-cultural systems at work to produce visibility. Kim is a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Creative Capital Award, Artadia Award, Mass Cultural Council Grant, MacDowell Fellowship, and the Brother Thomas Fellowship. She was an artist-in-residence at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Surf Point Foundation, Hermitage Artist Retreat, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work was recently exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College. Kim is Associate Professor of Art at Boston University.

Project Title- The Future Sound of the Arctic

Bio:

For the first time in history, climate change is bringing together two great composers,
renowned for their complex musical culture. Due to warming ocean temperatures,
humpback whales and bowhead whales may soon meet, and hear each other sing, for
the first time. This work, created in collaboration with performer/composer Annie
Lewandowski, explores the sonic universe that may emerge from this unprecedented
cultural crossover event.  
Kyle McDonald is an LA-based multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator whose
work explores the intersection of technology and humanity. He crafts interactive and
immersive audiovisual installations, performances, and new tools for creative
exploration—building new communities and collaborations along the way. He uses
techniques from computer vision, machine learning, and computing to ask questions
about how we connect—and to imagine a shared future. Kyle McDonald is a member of
an artist duo with Annie Lewandowski, who previously co-created with McDonald,
"Siren: Composers of the Sea," a meeting of humpback whale, human, and artificial
intelligence (MASS MoCA, Cornell University, Invisible Dog Art Center).e uses techniques from computer vision, machine learning, and computing to ask questions about how we connect—and to imagine a shared future.

Kyle has received grants and commissions from the IDFA DocLab, LACMA, NEA, Schirn Kunsthalle, STRP Festival, the V&A, YCAM, and more. His presents, leads workshops, and exhibits his work internationally at Ars Electronica, APAP, Art Center Nabi, Art Rock Festival, Alien Arts Center, Cornell, Day for Night, HeK, Hong Kong Arts Center, LLUM, Microwave, MU, NTT ICC, Onassis Cultural Center, Science Gallery, Sónar, TodaysArt, and many others.

Kyle also works as a technical and creative director through his studio IYOIYO. He consults on machine learning with a speciality in sound and music for companies like Google and Spotify, and for other artists including Chris Milk, Eduardo Kac, Es Devlin, Joanie Lemercier, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Wafaa Bilal, and others.

Project Title- All of the Above

Bio:

Gökçe Günel is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Rice University. Her latest book Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019) focuses on the construction of renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures in the United Arab Emirates, more specifically concentrating on the Masdar City project. Currently, she is at work on a second book project provisionally titled Energy Accumulation. This book seeks to criticize the unilinear logics of the energy transition narrative by studying the emergence of a Turkish-built floating power plant in Ghana. Dr. Günel finished her PhD in Anthropology at Cornell, and has served as Cultures of Energy Mellon-Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice University (2012-2013), ACLS New Faculty Fellow and Lecturer at Columbia University (2013-2016) and Assistant Professor in Middle East and North African Studies at the University of Arizona (2016-2019). Her articles have been published and are forthcoming in Limn, Ephemera, Engineering Studies, Public Culture, Anthropological Quarterly, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, The ARPA Journal, Avery Review, PoLAR, Log, e-flux, Perspecta, South Atlantic Quarterly and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. She has contributed to edited volumes, such as Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary (Lars Müller, 2016), Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon (Punctum Press, 2019), The New Arab Urban: Gulf Cities of Wealth, Ambition, and Distress (NYU Press, 2019), Frontier Assemblages (Wiley, 2019) and Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects (Reaktion Books, 2021).

Dr. Günel co-authored "A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography" (2020), and co-leads Patchwork Ethnography.

Project Title- Knowledge Politics and Pesticides in West Africa

Bio:
Jessie Luna is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University. Her research investigates how cultural politics intersect with processes of capitalism to produce and naturalize social inequalities and environmental change. Her recent research investigates how racial projects of modernity intersect with agricultural change, uneven wealth accumulation, and rural dispossession in the context of cotton farming in Burkina Faso. She has also studied embodied status politics among white runners in Boulder, Colorado and representations of Africa at the zoo. She is currently launching new research on pesticides in Côte d'Ivoire. Across her projects, Dr. Luna uses ethnographic methods to examine how the inequalities of neoliberal capitalism are produced and justified, drawing on theories of embodiment, culture, knowledge, and status to tease out how people understand their own roles in (re)producing or contesting systems of inequality and/or environmental degradation.

Jessie has been recognized for her impactful teaching at CSU. In 2024 she was named the Provost's Teaching Scholar, and in 2023 she was awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award for the College of Liberal Arts.

In 2024, Jessie joined as an editor at the Journal of Agrarian Change, a leading journal of rural change and agrarian political economy.

Before joining CSU, Dr. Luna earned a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder and a Masters degree in “Global Ecology and Sustainable Development” from the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland. She lived in Europe for several years and worked as a bicycle tour guide in France. Before that, Dr. Luna served as an agriculture Peace Corps Volunteer in Mali, West Africa, where she became passionate about the complex puzzles of sustainability, development, and global inequality. She speaks French and Bambara/Dioula.

Her research has appeared in journals such as World Development, Journal of Peasant Studies, Annual Review of Sociology, Journal of Agrarian Change, Qualitative Sociology, Environmental Sociology, Geoforum, and the Journal of Agriculture and Human Values.

Project Title- The Confucian Freud

Bio:

Howard Chiang, Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies, holds the Lai Ho & Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies. He has written two award-winning monographs on China, forming a duology of queer Asian Pacific history through the lens of knowledge production. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (2018) analyzes the history of sex change in China from the demise of castration in the late Qing era to the emergence of transsexuality in Cold War Taiwan. Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (2021) proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History (2019), a landmark 3-volume reference compendium. He is currently completing Trans Without Borders (under contract).

Chiang’s recent work centers on the historical and conceptual foundations of the human sciences, especially psychoanalysis, cultural psychiatry, and racial science. This will culminate in a book called Mind Hunters (under contract), which explores the history of psychoanalysis and transcultural reasoning across the Pacific. A podcast on this project is available here. He edits the “Critical Perspectives on Taiwan” book series from Columbia University Press and coedits the “Global Queer Asias” book series from the University of Michigan Press.

From 2019 to 2022, Chiang served as the Founding Chair of the Society of Sinophone Studies. His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from, among others, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, the Tang Prize Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust. Prior to joining UCSB as the Director of the Center for Taiwan Studies, he taught at NYU, the University of Warwick, the University of Waterloo, and UC Davis. At Waterloo, he was nominated for a Canada Research Chair in Transnational History.

Project Title- COLOR OF OXYGEN: Redesign for a Hospitable Future

Bio:

Amy Moran-Thomas, PhD is Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT.  Her ethnographic research focuses on how health technologies and ecologies are designed and come to be materially embodied—often inequitably—by people in their ordinary lives. Prof. Moran-Thomas received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Princeton University in 2012. Her writings have appeared in publications such as New England Journal of Medicine and Wired.  Her first book, Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic (University of California Press, 2019), offers an anthropological account of diabetes care technologies in use and the lives they shape in global perspective. The book received an award from the caregivers in Belize whose work it describes, the Diabetes Foot Care Group with the Caribbean Diabetes Association, as well as the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and the Wellcome Medal for Anthropology as Applied to Medical Problems.  A current member of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on the Use of Race and Ethnicity in Biomedical Research, Prof. Moran-Thomas is interested in public anthropology, ethnographic writing, and how social perspectives on design can contribute to producing more equitable health technologies.  She is currently working on a book project about oxygen.

Project Title- Earth's End: Animals and Humans on an Overworked Planet

Bio:

Juno Salazar Parreñas is an Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She examines human-animal relations, environmental issues, and efforts to institutionalize justice. She is the author of Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation (Duke UP, 2018), which received the 2019 Michelle Rosaldo Prize from the Association for Feminist Anthropology and honorable mentions for the 2020 Harry Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies, the 2019 Society for Medical Anthropology’s New Millennium Book Award and the 2019 Anthropology of Work and Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing’s Diana Forsythe Prize. Her articles appear in such journals as American Ethnologist, Anthropology and History, Cahiers d’Anthropologie Sociale, Catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, Environmental Humanities, History and Theory, positions: asia critique, and Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology, and Society. Her article, “Producing Affect: Transnational volunteerism in a Malaysian orangutan rehabilitation center,” received the 2013 General Anthropology Division’s Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship Prize. She is a former columnist for the Los Angeles based monthly magazine The Lesbian News. Her collaborations and conversations with artists such as Daniel Lie, Ines Lechleitner and Islands Songs (Nicolas Perret and Sylvia Ploner) have been hosted by MoMA, Ö1 Kunstradio, and Dokumenta 14. At Cornell, she teaches a range of interdisciplinary courses that include environmental ethics, introduction to feminist, gender and sexuality studies, as well as courses that speak to Southeast Asian studies. 

Project Title- Juridical Genetics: Building Postcolonial Carceral Futures

Bio:

Noah Tamarkin is an associate professor of Anthropology and Science & Technology Studies. His book Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa (Duke University Press in 2020) received the 2022 Jordan Schnitzer Prize in Social Science, Anthropology, and Folklore from the Association for Jewish Studies and the 2022 honorable mention for the Diana Forsythe Prize from the American Anthropological Association's Committee for the Anthropology of Science Technology and Computing, Society for the Anthropology of Work, and General Anthropology Division. It ethnographically examines the politics of race, religion, and recognition among Lemba people, Black South Africans who were part of Jewish genetic ancestry studies in the 1980s and 1990s. His current ethnographic research examines the introduction and implementation of South Africa’s national forensic DNA database, the forensic genetics networks that it has fostered, and its implications for postapartheid South African and global politics of surveillance statecraft, human rights, and carcerality. His next project considers trans health as experimental practice through which bodies and expertise are reconfigured. At Cornell, he teaches courses that explore race and religion; borders and belonging; policing, carcerality and abolition; biology and society; and the temporalities of genetics. He is also a research associate at University of Witwatersrand’s Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) in Johannesburg, South Africa.