Making Livable Worlds in a Time of Loss

Making Livable Worlds in a Time of Loss takes its title from Prof. Lloréns' recent book, and invites reflection about possible ways to navigate and survive the multiple ongoing crises in our current era. In Making Livable Worlds, Afro-Puerto Rican women's lifeways exemplify how they draw from their cultural knowledge to engage in daily improvisations that enable their communities to survive and thrive. Their life-affirming practices, developed and passed down through generations, offer powerful modes of resistance to gendered and racialized exploitation, capitalist extractivism, and ecocide. Through solidarity, reciprocity, and an ethics of care, these women co-create restorative alternatives to dispossession to produce good, meaningful lives for their communities.

What is evident in Making Livable Worlds is that ecological practices of care for the humans and more-than-human-world is central to nurturing livable futures. This insight served to inspire Prof. Lloréns' ongoing book project (tentatively) titled Nature Practices: The Outdoors in Color at the End of Nature, which explores how people of color, with a focus on Latinas and other women of color, access, experience, and benefit from tending to, and spending time in, nature and the outdoors. This book will examine and document articulations of living with and alongside nature in the rapidly shifting terrain of a socio-political and environmental global polycrisis.

The following seminar conversations will explore several themes related to Prof. Lloréns' current research, including gardening, plant life, and colonial ecologies; gender and race in nature/outdoors, racialized nature(s), nature as spaces of work, therapy, and refuge; and nature, mindfulness, and the value of slowing down in the face of neoliberal time, among other themes.

Session 1: Botany of Empire, in conversation with Prof. Banu Subramaniam
Mon. 9/29, 12:45-2:00pm
Lulu 413

Session 2: Making Livable Worlds, in conversation with Prof. Susan Ellison
Mon. 11/10, 12:45-2:00pm
Lulu 413

Session 3: Mangroves as Life, in conversation with Prof. Carlos Garcia-Quijano
Mon. 3/23, 12:45-2:00pm
Lulu 413

Session 4: Storying Goodness for Young Readers, in conversation with Dr. Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie
Mon. 4/6, 12:45-2:00pm
Lulu 413

Cornille Seminar sessions are open to all faculty, staff, and students. Lunch will be provided at each session. RSVPs required—please click here to register.