This Spring the UT Humanities Institute is partnering with Planet Texas 2050 to host a Difficult Dialogues public panel with a presentation from Paige West, Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. Her presentation is titled “Hard Choices & Opportunities: Environment and Economy" and will draw on her research in Papua New Guinea to discuss questions such as: How can researchers galvanize social and political action for change around climate-related issues? Specifically, how can writing climate change ethnographically allow scholars to reach a broader public?

This panel will also feature a panel of respondents including Jason Cons, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UT Austin, and a member of the Austin community working on environmental change. The discussion will be moderated by Pauline Strong, Director of the Humanities Institute.

This event is free and open to the public.

Please RSVP here if you would like to attend.

About the Guest Speaker: 
Paige West, who is the Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology, joined the faculty at Barnard College and Columbia University in 2001, the year after earning her Ph.D. in cultural and environmental anthropology at Rutgers University. Dr. West’s broad scholarly interest is the relationship between societies and their environments. More specifically, she has written about the intersections between indigenous epistemic practices and conservation science, the linkages between environmental conservation and international development, the material and symbolic ways in which the natural world is understood and produced, the aesthetics and poetics of human social relations with nature, and the creation of commodities and practices of consumption. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Papua New Guinea (PNG), Australia, Germany, England, and the United States.

Dr. West’s books are Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea (Columbia University Press, 2016), From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea (Duke University Press, 2012), and Conservation is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea (Duke University Press, 2006). 

About the Difficult Dialogues / Planet Texas 2050 Lecture Series on the Environment:
Dr. West's talk and panel discussion is one of two public panels co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute and Planet Texas 2050. The first public forum took place in Fall 2018 and featured a presentation by Dr. Eric Klinenberg, author of Heat Wave and Palaces for the People. 

The Humanities Institute’s Difficult Dialogues program aims to bring resources for facilitating dialogue on difficult and controversial topics to the classroom and the public. Founded in 2006 at the University of Texas, Difficult Dialogues began as part of a Ford Foundation initiative developed in response to reports of growing intolerance and efforts to curb academic freedom on U.S. campuses. The program’s public forums focusing on current controversial topics complement its associated undergraduate courses and engage a broader public.

Planet Texas 2050 is the first of the university's Bridging Barriers initiatives, which are aimed at tackling some of the most pressing issues of our time. Developed in 2016, Planet Texas 2050 promotes interdisciplinary collaboration and research around climate change, extreme weather, population, and resource management for the purpose of creating a more sustainable future.

About the Respondent: 
Jason Cons is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He works on borders in South Asia, climate and agrarian change, and rural development. He has conducted extensive research in Bangladesh on a range of issues including: climate security, disputed territory along the India-Bangladesh border, the impacts of shrimp aquaculture in coastal areas, the politics of development, and recipient experiences with microcredit. His current research is situated in the Sundarbans region and explores the ways that imaginations of the impacts of future climate change are shaping the delta and the India-Bangladesh border in the present.