Sociology scholar Nandita Sharma will be in conversation with conceptual artist and food-access activist Gaye Chan of Eating In Public. The conversation, moderated by curator and writer Radhika Subramaniam, will be discussing the throughline of movement and mobility in postcolonial visual culture as it develops alongside the climate-changed future.
Cooper Climate Week 2021 is a series of lectures and events that aim to engage our communities in assessing the role of the climate crisis in our day-to-day lives. This year, we'll focus on the themes of reconstruction and deconstruction as we imagine all of the work ahead of us. The Cooper Climate Coalition aims to promote curiosity, interdisciplinary dialogue, and sustained engagement with the climate crisis.
The Cooper Climate Coalition is pleased to present a virtual series of lectures and events. *These lectures will be online only. RSVP HERE.
Nandita Sharma is an activist scholar whose research is shaped by the social movements she is active in, including No Borders movements and those struggling for the planetary commons. She is the author of Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of ‘Migrant Workers’ in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006) and Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020). Sharma is Professor of the Sociology Department at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Toronto.
Gaye Chan is a conceptual artist who moves between solo and collaborative activities that take place on the web, in publications, streets as well as galleries. Her recent work often ruminates on how cartography and photography simultaneously offer and occlude information.Chan’s collaborative projects include being a part of Eating in Public and Downwind Productions. Eating in Public is an anti-capitalism project nudging a little space outside of the commodity system. Following the path of pirates and nomads, hunters and gathers, diggers and levelers, they gather at people’s homes, plant free food gardens on private and public land, set up free stores, all without permission.
Radhika Subramaniam is a curator and writer with an interdisciplinary practice that deploys such platforms as exhibitions, texts and public art interventions as conscious forms of knowledge-making. She is interested in the poetics and politics of crises and surprises, particularly urban crowds, cultures of catastrophe and human-animal relationships. She was the first Director/Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center (SJDC) at The New School from 2009-2017 and is also Associate Professor of Visual Culture in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons School of Design. Previously Director of Cultural Programs at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, she was founding executive editor of an interdisciplinary journal, Connect: Art. Politics. Theory. Practice. She is presently working on a book on a medieval elephant embassy.
The Cooper Climate Coalition, an open body of students, faculty, and staff at The Cooper Union, facilitates conversations, events, and student projects within the institution that center the Climate Crisis and its intersections with races, classes, genders, sexualities, histories, economies, political structures and more.
Along with organizing Cooper Union’s Climate Week programs and events in the fall, the Climate Coalition takes responsibility for fostering interdisciplinarity throughout The Cooper Union in support of environmental action.
