Category: Bully Pulpit
Public scholarship is a way to counter challenges to the relevance of art history. It is a way to connect academic knowledge and community knowledge. It is a way to honor social knowledge. It is a way to share expertise, so that more people have access to reliable information. It is a way to support the democratic potential of museums and higher education.
Today my ecocritical praxis continues to focus on literature of environmental justice and also involves biosemiotics, which is the study of qualitative semiotic or communicative capabilities that are considered to exist in a variety of nonhuman life forms, from the largest redwoods down to the simplest organisms living in the soil.
A more satisfying definition entails important ethical and often activist dimensions relating to both human and other-than-human life.
Inuit artists such as Ashevak and Teevee have created works that celebrate local ecologies and multispecies relations, but also have offered significant portrayals of the disintegration of the ecological fabric and tattering of ecospiritual and ecosocial relations.
Historical art does something ecologically significant with form by revealing implication (from the Latin implicare, meaning to entwine)—an intractable state of entanglement, interconnection, and mutual responsibility.
The seemingly paradoxical phrase indicates that an enduring disposition toward Native cultures as earth-sensitive alternatives to the damaging ideologies and practices of Euro-American industrial modernity is inadequate to the challenges of complex crises.
in my view, the most compelling cultural work is that which explores and develops modes of ecology-as-intersectionality, wherein political ecology links with Indigenous and/or queer rights activism and/or movements against police brutality, media censorship, and capitalist extraction.