Public Humanities Network Workshop & Conversation
"Reckoning with Settler Colonialism and Imagining Just Futures"
Timothy Eatman, Dean, Honors Living-Learning Community, Rutgers University-Newark
Jack Tchen, Director, Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, Rutgers University-Newark
Thursday, December 1, 2-3:30 pm EST
Recording: Due to the sensitivity of the topics discussed at this workshop, a recording of this event is available by request. Please write Membership and Diversity Officer Aaron Fai (afai@berkeley.edu) or the general CHCI email (chci@humanities.wisc.edu) for access.
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Registration: This virtual event is free, but registration is limited to 25 participants. Register here to attend via Zoom, then send a short (less than one page) biographical document, including your interest in the workshop and how it speaks to your public humanities practice, or what you hope to learn, to Dave Marr at davemarr@uga.edu. Your registration will be complete once this document has been sent. Those who register after the first 25 will be added to a wait list and notified if a space opens. If you are among the first 25 to register and are unable to attend, please notify Dave Marr so that we can allow someone else to participate in your place.
Participant biographies and other preparatory materials will be shared with the group in advance of the workshop.
Format: Conversation with small group discussion and Q&A. The workshop will begin with a 15-20 minute presentation, which will be followed by a wide-ranging group conversation.
Organizers' Description: Tim Eatman and Jack Tchen of Rutgers University-Newark have been working to decolonize the historical understanding of the "founding" of Newark as a question of the uses and misuses of the land and waters, as a means to bring more communities together for supporting and acting on climate justice. They will present what is being done with students at Dean Eatman's Honors Living and Learning Community with Tchen, and also historian and organizer Tchen's efforts to pull together disenfranchised communities along the Passaic Watershed Basin of northern New Jersey with Tim and Chief Vincent Mann, Turtle Clan, Ramapough Lenape Nation—work supported by a planning grant from the National Science Foundation.
These efforts are part of a bioregional scale of organizing across fractured academic, public-private, and community silos to conduct climate action research with students, communities students are from, civil society, and public land grant universities.
Over recent years, Indigenous North American scholars and historians of what's called "Atlantic world" studies have reframed our understanding of how competing European colonialisms operated in dispossessing coastal Native American communities away from coveted coastal lands and waters forming the Anglo-American Protestant "Thirteen Colonies."
Researching parcels of land through the examination of parcel documents makes "real" this occupying process. In doing so we begin to understand the linkage between the processes of the enslavement of Indigenous African peoples, and the objective of supporting wealth and power building, especially in the creation of global trade exchanges, through massive extraction from coastal lands and waters.
Today, the bioregional and global challenge we of coastal Atlantic world communities face is how we mitigate the cascading impacts of global warming with core social justice values at the core of whatever we do bioregionally. At the same time, are we reentering a new cold war, pitting neoliberal superpowers against each other? Who will be "greener" to "save" the world—the US or China? Yet, what of Indigenous Local Knowledge and Traditional Environmental Knowlege? What of grassroots citizen actions?