Landscape Across the Disciplines Research Workshop
- Faculty Coordinators: Teri Rueb (Media Study), David Mark (Geography), and Tina Thurston (Anthropology)
Landscape Across the Disciplines provides a platform for interdisciplinary research, criticism, debate, and exchange around the subject of landscape. The heterogeneous formation of this group that spans the arts, humanities and physical and social sciences recognizes the unique position of landscape to potentially integrate discourses and practices across disciplines. Through the formation of this on-going workshop, we seek to exercise landscape as a conceptual pivot around which very different ways of knowing and doing might come together, revealing similarities and differences and fostering a greater understanding from which individual and collaborative research may unfold. Through reading group discussions, guest lectures, performances and collaborative projects our aim is to underscore the growing recognition that environment and culture are intimately linked and that in order to address the ecological challenges of our times we must engage rigorous interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches that span the arts and sciences, theory and practice, experience and affect.
Check our blog: http://landscapeworkshop.wordpress.com/
MEETINGS
Fall 2013
September 23, 1PM
Caroline Funk, UB Department of Anthropology
The Gender Institute, The Commons, Room 207
October 2, 6:30PM
Bill Gilbert, University of New Mexico
Center for the Arts, Room 112 Auditorium
October 14, 3PM
Jolene Rickard, Cornell University
Center for the Arts, Room 112, Auditorium
Jolene Rickard, Ph.D. is a visual historian, artist, and curator interested in the issues of Indigeneity within a global context. She is the Director for the American Indian Program at Cornell University and an associate professor in the History of Art and Visual Studies and Art Departments. Recent essays include “The Emergence of Global Indigenous Art” in Sakahan: International Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Canada, 2013, “Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors,” in The South Atlantic Quarterly: Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law, 110:2, Spring 2011, “Skin Seven Spans Thick,” in Hide: Skin as Material and Metaphor, NMAI: DC, 2010, “Absorbing or Obscuring the Absence of a Critical Space in the Americas for Indigeneity: The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian,” in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 52, Autumn, 2007, and Rebecca Belmore: Fountain by Jolene Rickard and Jessica Bradley, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery, Canada, 2005.
Recent projects include; Advisor – “Sakahàn: 1st International Quinquennial of New Indigenous Art”, at the National Gallery of Canada in 2013, Cornell/Duke 54th Venice Biennale Dialogue (Italy) 2011, Banff Residency-Painter House Conversations (Canada) 2010, Te Tihi Scholar/Artist Gathering (New Zealand) 2010, Ford Foundation Research Grant, 2008-11 and co-curator for the inaugural exhibition for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, D.C.) 2004.
Jolene is from the Tuscarora Nation territories in western New York.
Novmeber 1, All day
Haudenosaunee Research Sympsosium
Organized & sponsored by the Haudenosaunee-Native American Research Workshop
108 O’Brian Hall
November 25, 10AM
Alice Hovorka, University of Guelph
The Gender Institute, The Commons, Room 207
Spring 2013
April 5 & 6
Landscape Across the Disciplines Symposium
Sponsored by SUNY Conversations Across the Disciplines
Keyontes to include: Edward Casey (SUNY Stonybrook, Philosophy; Peter Del Tredici, Harvard / Arnold Arboretum; Lucy Lippard, Independent Writer, Galisteo, NM)
January 30, 3:00 – 5:00
Tom Bittner, UB Geography and Philosophy
The Gender Institute, The Commons, Room 207
February 20, 3:00 – 5:00
Scott Mackay, UB Geography
The Gender Institute, The Commons, Room 207
“Ecosystem Patterns and Processes: Points, Paint-by-numbers, and Spatial Continua”
March 20, 3:00 – 5:00
Graduate Student Roundtable/Workshop
The Gender Institute, The Commons, Room 207
April 24, 3:00 – 5:00
Sarah Elder, UB Media Study
The Gender Institute, The Commons, Room 207
Fall 2012
Wednesday, October 3, 10AM-12PM
Location: The Gender Institute, Room 207, The Commons
Thursday, October 18, 4PM-6PM
Location: 120 Clemens
Speaker: Robert Pogue Harrison
“Landscape and Sanity”
Co-hosted by the Gender Institute and the Ecocritical Theory Reading Group
Thursday, October 25, 1PM-3PM
Location: CFA 112
Speaker: Leslie Carol Roberts, Author of “The Entire Earth and Sky: Views of Antartica”
Co-hosted by Landscape Across the Disciplines Research Group and the Open Air Institute
Wednesday, November 7, 10AM-12PM
Location: The Gender Institute, Room 207, The Commons
Speaker: Tina Thurston, UB Anthropology
“Being Well, Dwelling, Digging: Cultural Landscape in Archaeological Perspective”
Since the late 1980s, landscape has emerged as a major paradigm in archaeological studies of the distant and recent past. Rather than referring simply to regions or a territories, landscape archaeology began as a radical approach that sought to permanently replace the artifact, the feature and the site as the only foci of analysis, and embed them permanently within the humanly constructed, performed, imagined, and symbolized landscape, the cultural landscape, as well as study its simultaneous role in molding past concepts of self and society. The landscape archaeology theoretical framework is illustrated with a case study of dwelling, livelihood, and perception during a period of rapid and substantive social change in protohistoric northern Europe.
Wednesday, December 5, 10AM-12PM
Location: The Gender Institute, Room 207, The Commons
Speaker: Colleen Culleton, UB Romance Languages and Literatures
“The Landscape in the Background: Envisioning Territory in Contemporary Catalonia”
This project explores the intersection of literary, cultural, political, and environmental discourses about water in Catalonia. Water’s presence on the landscape is a prominent feature in Catalan cultural production, which, in turn, is a significant medium for the articulation of what it means to be Catalan. Is it impossible to ignore the idealization of the rural, the romanticization of landscape, and the nostalgia for a way of life that foments a sense of connectedness to place, which inform representations of the Catalan territory in contemporary media. One might read this as an obvious political gesture for this Stateless nation, especially given the very recent discussions of Catalonia’s secession from Spain. However those who take a sentimentalized approach to the landscape are missing something, for while they celebrate the territory, they leave out the tourists and the trash. The sense of territorial identity that underlies nostalgic evocations of charming rural traditions and images of postcard ready landscapes meets with compelling responses, in the arts and in environmental care, from on-the-ground approaches that have little patience for sentiment.
