DERT’s inaugural project was the symposium called “Performing Diverse Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture at the Crux of Ecological Change,” held March 3–5, 2017 at the Indiana Memorial Union at Indiana University, Bloomington.
This symposium brought together fifteen leading scholars to promote understanding of the roles of expressive culture in situations of ecological challenge and to stimulate collaborative research on the diverse environmentalisms of local and Indigenous groups, whose perspectives are often neglected in public discourses about the environment. Rooted in local communities and Indigenous practices, the genres and forms of expressive culture—including songs, stories, handicrafts, and ritual and activist practices—offer powerful resources to individuals and communities as they seek to interpret and manage ecological change.
The central goals of this symposium were to formulate a typology of diverse environmentalisms, to trace the social and political dynamics of performance genres implicated in environmental discourse, to articulate methodologies for both research and collaborative environmental projects, and to identify a set of exemplary case studies that can effectively communicate the constitutive role of expressive culture at the crux of ecological change. The intent was to establish the performance of diverse environmentalisms as “a thing,” which is to say, as one viable and even necessary perspective on ecological change and environmental management.
There were four sessions over a three-day period filled with intellectual ferment and much conviviality—here are the themes treated in these sessions:
- Approaches to Diverse Environmentalisms
- Applied Projects
- The Sacred Environment
- Managing the Environment
The March 2017 symposium succeeded in stimulating conversations leading to the release of our volume of collected essays, Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change, edited by John Holmes McDowell, Katey Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, and Sue Tuohy and published by the University of Illinois Press in 2021.
Click here to view the symposium program and abstracts.
