Mark your calendars and join PEWS for the following upcoming events!
UC-UJ Climate Justice World Café: An International and Interdisciplinary Conversation
Thursday, October 24th
10:00am – 11:00am EST
(4:00pm – 5:00pm SAST)
Virtual Webinar – A link will be sent to your email after registration
Register here!
A climate justice perspective recognizes that climate risks and vulnerabilities, as well as the benefits and burdens of climate actions, are anything but equally distributed, and that climate shocks often exacerbate existing inequalities. Advancing climate justice means attending to the specific needs and interests of disproportionately affected groups and working alongside impacted communities to reverse these trends. Scholars across disciplines have a role to play in advancing climate justice — in educational, community, societal, and policy contexts. This World Café brings together scholars from the University of Cincinnati and the University of Johannesburg to discuss their perspectives, current work, and critical questions on the climate crisis. Panelists represent diverse, interdisciplinary backgrounds, including anthropology, psychology, poetry, education, political science, and science and technology studies. We hope you will join us for this critical discussion on one of the most pressing global challenges facing humanity today.
Moderated by PEWS Faculty Affiliate and Sustainability Director, Carlie Trott.
Panelists
Harshavardhan Bhat, Ph.D., is a researcher and writer interested in the social study of monsoonal futures. Bhat is currently thinking through concerns of an abolitional meteorology, exploring the archives of global climatic logistics and its accounting categories, in unpacking stories of race, tropical meteorology and decarceration. His book manuscript Maḷḷæ explores the death of seasonalities and politics of a global story of rain, at a time of breakdown. Recent writings can be found in GeoHumanities, Lo Squaderno, Hyphen Journal, Monsoon As Method (book), Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene (book), International Relations in the Anthropocene(textbook), Aquatic Encounters (book), among others. Prior to his PhD, Harshavardhan worked in academia and also consulted on political communications and policy concerns for states and electoral campaigns.
Megan Jeanne Gette approaches the techne of listening and atmospherics as modes of description against extractive industry. Her book project, thoughtlessness, centers Venus as a means to understand how prospective modeling and measurement of climate change in the American West is affected by ordinary ways of listening with heat, tremors and breath. This work follows ethnographic cases mostly in the Permian Basin, where citizen sensing of darkness, methane and frackquakes intensifies the oil and gas industry’s “regimes of (im)perceptibility” (Calvillo 2018) with and against its technorational solutions. As an arts-based researcher, her work takes experimental forms that account for co-laboring and thinking multiply.
Stephanie Klarmann, Ph.D., is a Conservation Psychology researcher based in South Africa. Her work has focused primarily on envisioning a conservation psychology that is relevant in the South African context with a stronger focus on justice. Her other areas of interest include capacity building, conservation and wildlife photography for storytelling, and environmental education for teenagers and young adults. Stephanie is also the campaign coordinator for Blood Lions/Youth for Lions and an Executive Member of the Climate, Environment and Psychology division of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA).
Sergio Malatji holds a Master of Arts in Psychology from the University of Johannesburg. His research centres on food security and food intervention programs in institutions of higher learning, focusing on the complexities of solutions, student politics/mobilisation, and sustainability. He uses the transformative paradigm’s theoretical resources to write about accompaniment, amplification of the voices of marginalised people, and campaigns for environmental justice. His other interests include strategies for promoting social equity and ecological well-being through qualitative and collaborative approaches.
Fatima Peters is a PhD student at the University of Johannesburg where she is completing her PhD in Climate Psychology. Her scholarship focuses on the use of critical research methodologies by climate psychologists. She focuses on the role of critical methodologies to center the voices of people who experience marginalization and the extended burden of climate injustice. By reconsidering the role of critical research methodologies, she furthermore focuses on how we can improve our research praxis to be more ethical, collaborative and just when working in diverse climate related contexts.
Claire Underwood is a Doctoral Student at the University of Cincinnati, where she is the Editorial Assistant for Children, Youth, Environments (CYE) and conducts research with the Arlitt Center for Education, Research, & Sustainability. Claire began her career as a community organizer and worked in social and environmental justice nonprofits for more than a decade. Her research focuses on how nature preschools are being impacted by and responding to climate change. Through her work, Claire seeks to support teachers, children, and families in affirming children’s agency, supporting their connection to the Earth, and working meaningfully together to address the climate crisis.
Changing How People Think and Act on Climate Change
Friday, October 25th.
5:00pm – Reception
5:30-6:30pm – Presentation.
Probasco Auditorium, 2839 Clifton Ave. Cincinnati, OH 45220.
Register here!
Climate change is an urgent threat to the people and places we love. Solutions to climate change exist, but we are held back by the lack of public and political will to successfully address the issue. Put simply, the primary barriers are social and psychological in nature. In this presentation, Dr. Matthew Goldberg discusses promising climate change communication opportunities, success stories, and tools for thinking about how we generate the understanding and motivation that is needed to address climate change.
Dr. Matthew Goldberg is a Research Scientist and the Director of Experimental Research at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication at Yale University. His research focuses on persuasion, social influence, and strategic communication about climate change, renewable energy, and other urgent environmental, social, and political issues. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and scientific reports, and his research is regularly cited in prominent news outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post. In 2022, he was named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science, and last year he received the Early Career Achievement Award from division 34 of the American Psychological Association for exceptional research contributions. Five years ago, he co-founded XandY—an independent research and strategy firm that helps the world’s most important ideas and innovations build momentum in society.
Beyond Brownfields: Nature, Design and Urban Regeneration in the Post-Industrial Landscape
Thursday, January 30th
6:00 pm – Reception
6:30 – 8:00 pm – Presentation
Probasco Auditorium, 2839 Clifton Ave. Cincinnati, OH 45220.
Save the date for a public lecture by Niall Kirkwood, Charles Eliot Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. This event is organized by Dr. Sangyong Cho, PEWS Affiliate and Assistant Professor of the Landscape Architecture Program at the School of Planning. The lecture will be featured as part of PEWS’ second annual Sustainability@UC week, a week full of sustainability-related events and activities for students, researchers, educators, and the public.
Lecture description: The class of site known as ‘brownfield’ is universal. That is, it is not only found across every part of the country, but in every nation and across each continent. It is also still the most contentious-politically, ecologically, culturally and therefore important for planners, architects and landscape architects in shaping the places and sensibilities of any national, regional or local civic landscape.
Some of the wider issues surrounding the subject of brownfields will be introduced. Topics will range from Kirkwood’s research into brownfield sites internationally over the last 35 years to a summary of the principles and strategies of site design that demonstrate brownfield remediation and recovery as an infrastructural investment in communities and society.
Finally, speculation on the next decade will focus on more integrated yet complex global brownfield futures where stark and forgotten landscapes, places of devastation and neglect, will ultimately be redeemable, and vital as part of any national vision in the 21st century.
Niall Kirkwood is a landscape architect, technologist and the Charles Eliot Professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) where he has taught full time since 1991. In addition, for the last five years he served as the Academic Dean at the GSD. He also holds research appointments at Tsinghua University, Beijing and Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok.
Over the last forty-five years in design practice and in academic institutions he has carried out built projects, research initiatives and authored key publications that focused on core issues in regeneration and the design and implementation of designed landscapes in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. These engage a range of topics related to brownfields, climate change and adaptation, and the sustainable reuse of land including urban regeneration, landfill and post-mining site reclamation, environmental site technologies and many forms of site development in the global post-industrial landscape.
Kirkwood is a leading expert in the reuse and remaking of global brownfields and their integration of environmental remediation, site engineering, landscape design and cultural and social programs.
Stay tuned for more information about registering for the public lecture and other ways to participate in Sustainability@UC week 2025!
Save the date:
Climate Justice World Café
Friday, December 6th
9:00-10:00am EST
Virtual Webinar – A link will be sent to your email after registration
Save the date for the second round of Climate Justice World Café! More details to come.