This month’s Rabinowitz Speaker Series: Society’s Role in a Changing Environment, co-hosted by Program on the Environment and School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, is next week, January 9. Join us from 4:30–6pm in Wallace Hall Commons.

Our January speaker is Cleo Woelfle-Erskine. The title of his talk is Extinction’s Affects: Relational politics for field ecologists.

Bio

Dr. Cleo Woelfle-Erskine is an ecologist, hydrologist, writer, and scholar of water, working with mentor Karen Barad to explore queer, transgender, and decolonial possibilities for ecological science. In July 2017, he joined the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs at the University of Washington as Assistant Professor of Equity and Environmental Justice.

Cleo’s research focuses on ecological and social dimensions of human relations to rivers and their multi-species inhabitants. Trained in ecology, hydrology, geomorphology, critical social science, and feminist science and technology studies, he facilitates collaborative research in partnership with tribes, agencies, citizen scientists, and local community members.

His PhD work in the energy and resources group at UC Berkeley involved a collaborative of scientists and local residents who are experimenting with storing winter rain to increase summer streamflow. He is developing research projects on hydro-ecological and social effects of beaver relocation in eastern Washington, and environmental justice dimensions of fishing and shellfishing in urban Puget Sound. As a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz, Cleo explored queer, transgender, and decolonial possibilities for ecological science. His manuscript in progress, Underflow: Transfiguring riverine relations, imagining queer-trans ecologies considers the lingering presences of Manifest Destiny (ecological, socio-scientific, and psychological) and the ways that this injurious “destiny” can be transfigured and overturned to renew human-water-fish relations.

The topic of Cleo’s talk next week will present case studies that examine the affective dimensions of studying species extinction.

Talk summary: Extinction’s Affects: Relational politics for field ecologists

Ecologists are on the front line of the sixth mass extinction, as intimates die at alarming rates. What radical politics and transformative potentials can arise from witnessing these transgressive intimacies, even or especially among more-than-human others dying because of human (in)action? I search for signs of resistant ‘world making’ (Munoz) in ephemeral moments where scientists were able to speak their grief at extinction and love for their study species, through three cases: (1) scientists’ field photos and captions circulated during a twitter #cuteoff, (2) my own encounters with dead salmon during ecological field studies, and (3) “Tell A Salmon Your Troubles,” an interactive performance in which scientist confessed their troubles about data, habitat loss, and extinction to a silent yet responsive salmon character. I explore resonance between queer and trans theory and indigenous theory that foregrounds multispecies ethics and relational practices, and consider how field ecologists can challenge settler ontologies and epistemologies embedded in scientific and environmental management practices.

Join us every first Tuesday from January – April 2018, from 4:30–6pm in Wallace Hall Commons.  Faculty talks are followed by Q&A and time for mingling. Light refreshments served.