Conferences & Symposia•Talks

Micropolitics of environmental media

January 4, 2024•3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
The Climate Stories Incubator This talk by Allison Carruth is part of the Screen Arts and Culture Forum-sponsored panel session at the 2024 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Philadelphia. The session explores how media studies and environmental studies interface in the field of ecomedia. The speakers will address case studies in ecomedia research, teaching, public engagement and creative practice. The panel is convened [...]
Invitational Events•Roundtables•Workshops

Environmental humanities institution building

December 6, 2023•3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Environmental Humanities Institution Building Symposium This invitational virtual event will feature Blue Lab director Allison Carruth in conversation with Elizabeth Hennessy, (professor of history and environmental studies at Wisconsin), Weishun Lu (Edge Effects managing editor and PhD student in English at Wisconsin), and Paul Sabin (professor of history and American studies at Yale). The group will be in conversation about the evolution and horizons [...]
Conferences & Symposia•Exhibits & Screenings•Invitational Events

Building life symposium (Princeton | MoMA)

November 10, 2023
Building Life: Spatial Politics, Science and Environmental Epistemes This two-day public symposium examines how entanglements between the interdisciplinary fields of the built environment and the sciences have transformed concepts of nature, territory, and the environment over time, reproducing global inequities that continue to (un)build life. The symposium will feature an array of scholars and practitioners whose work is reshaping our understanding of what it [...]
Conferences & Symposia

ASLE + AESS 2023 conference panel

July 11, 2023•1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
Experiments in Place-based Environmental Research and Creative Practice This roundtable will introduce works-in-progress from Blue Lab core team members. Introducing several current projects, the roundtable will discuss our approaches to place-based environmental research and creative practice. The guiding question for our shared work, which will structure the discussion, is how climate change and other planetary crises are being lived in real-time and how different [...]
Invitational Events•Workshops

Creative practice for social impact workshop

March 2, 2023•6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
University of Texas, Arlington

Co-led by Allison Carruth and Barron Bixler of Princeton University's Blue Lab, this workshop is designed for scholars and students from across disciplines who have a creative practice or creative project idea and would benefit from insights on how to develop such work into a public-facing project with social impact. The workshop addresses a combination of conceptual principles and practical approaches to making collaborative, creative, multimedia work and finding audiences for it. For this invitational workshop at the University of Texas, Arlington, we will take as food and environmental justice storytelling as a case study.
Invitational Event•Lectures & Keynotes•Workshop

Experiments in environmental humanities: Research, teaching, collaboration

Community Collaborations, Creative Practice, Environmental Humanities, Public Humanities
January 27, 2023
This lecture and workshop will be held for faculty and student fellows as well as community partners in the Mellon-funded HumanitiesX Collaborative at DePaul University. It will introduce the environmental humanities as a field and share several examples of projects and centers that offer models of the field’s experimental, place-based and participatory approaches.
Roundtables

Intergenerational environmental humanities

Environmental Humanities, Environmental Justice, Literary Studies, Narrative
January 7, 2023•1:45 pm - 3:00 pm
San Francsco Moscone Center
Early career, mid-career, and senior scholars in the environmental humanities discuss intergenerational knowledge work, changes in scope and aim, mentorship, and potential futures in the field. Organized by Sarah Dimick (Harvard) and Alexander Menrisky (University of Connecticut). Participants include Joni Adamson (Arizona State), Heidi Amin-Hong (UC Santa Barbara), Allison Carruth (Princeton), Kuhelika Ghosh (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Cajetan Iheka (Yale), and Jesse Oak Taylor [...]
Lectures & Keynotes

‘The science is clear’: Why the climate crisis needs new narratives”

Climate, Narrative, Science & Culture
April 5, 2022•12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Princeton University

"'The Science is Clear" make a case for narratives that develop localized, lived accounts of climate change by drawing from examples that at once contribute on-the-ground knowledge and envision possible futures beyond catastrophe.
Lectures & Keynotes

Nature remade

Climate, Environmental Humanities, Technology & Culture
October 25, 2021•3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
University of Tennessee (Virtual)

"Nature remade" addresses a strain of environmental thought centered on the West Coast that advances a simultaneously neocolonial and futuristic orientation to the climate crisis. Through this lens of nature remade,ecosystems must be technologically retrofitted to sustain privileged modes of human life—rather than remediated through structural transformations that arc toward environmental justice.
Roundtables

Talking trash book response

Art & Media, Environmental Humanities, Environmental Justice, Urban Ecologies
May 28, 2020•2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
UCLA (via Zoom)

An online discussion of Maite Zubiaurre's 2019 book Talking Trash: Cultural Uses of Waste with Allison Carruth and Charlene Villaseñor-Black.
Lectures & Keynotes

Nature by design

Climate
November 18, 2019•4:30 pm - 6:00 pm
Princeton University

Proposals to revive and reintroduce extinct species—known as de-extinction—garner outsize attention in discussions of biodiversity loss and climate adaptation. “Nature by Design” compares the scientific literature and popular science around de-extinction as it has been envisioned in the U.S. and considers its complicated relationship to the discourse of rewilding cities, farmlands, forests and parks.
Lectures & Keynotes

Life after Earth

October 17, 2019•5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
Princeton University

The 2019 Anschutz Distinguished Fellow lecture, this talk connected twentieth-century engineered transformations of the California landscape to past and ongoing proposals for extraterrestrial engineering, and examined the assumptions underlying real-world and speculative world-building projects.
Community Events•Exhibits & Screenings

KCET environmental film festival

April 21, 2018•9:30 am - 6:30 pm
Laemmle’s Monica Film Center in Santa Monica

This annual film festival organized by KCET/SoCal PBS featured two documentary shorts produced by UCLA’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS), alongside four feature films and a premier of KCET's 2018 season of “Earth Focus.”
Community Events•Conferences & Symposia•Exhibits & Screenings

LENS program at Earth Now/Earth 2050

October 18, 2016
UCLA Luskin Conference Center

From public policy to installation art, this conference explored all facets of modern environmental challenges and highlights efforts to make lives and businesses more sustainable. It served as the debut of the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS).
Community Events

Play the LA River launch

September 13, 2014•3:00 pm
Los Angeles River Center
Synopsis At the annual Artwalk in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Atwater Village, the Project 51 team launched the Play the LA River project and released the project’s free card deck guide to the river. The public event drew several hundred participants for a day of performances, art making, games and river exploration. The launch kicked off a year of public programming along the fifty-one [...]
Talks

Bioart

November 21, 2013•3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Washington State University Bread Lab

Presentation about movement known as bioart to plant scientist community at Washington State University's Bread Lab, with a focus on agricultural and culinary artistic experiments.
Community Events•Roundtables

Aspen Ideas Festival

July 2, 2012•5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Aspen Institute

A conversation about the future of cities, food and work, with Allison Carruth, Layla Janah, Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley. An "Inspiring Innovators" plenary session at the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival.
Community Events•Conferences & Symposia•Exhibits & Screenings

Food Justice Conference

February 19, 2011
University of Oregon

The 2011 Food Justice Conference shared research from a wide range of disciplines, built opportunities for collaboration, and connected Oregon food and agriculture communities to national and international groups. Participants included policymakers, nonprofit leaders, farmers, and artists as well as scholars in anthropology, literary and cultural studies, law, ethics, environmental studies, plant genetics, soil sciences, geography, sociology, agriculture, marine biology, and visual art.