Imagining Otherwise
Imagining Otherwise
This panel focuses on highlighting how the humanities offer crucial tools for reimagining environmental futures and addressing the slow, uneven forms of harm that often remain invisible in scientific or policy discourse. The interdisciplinary panel brings together faculty members from Art History; History; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Art; and English. Panelist will discuss how different humanistic disciplines approach environmental questions, how various forms of artistic expression illuminate ecological issues, and what it means to think collaboratively about climate change across fields. Focusing on the breadth of approaches within the humanities, the panel offers students and community members a deeper understanding of how the humanities can make environmental issues newly visible, emotionally resonant, and culturally meaningful.
Speaker Bios:
Neda Atanasoski
is Professor and Chair of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park and Associate Director of Education for the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM). Atanasoski’s interdisciplinary research has focused on feminism and AI, feminist and critical race approaches to science and technology studies, AI and the future of work, militarism, and human rights and humanitarianism. She is the author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (2013), co-author of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (2019), and co-editor of Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution (2022) and Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen (2025). Atanasoski has been the recipient of numerous grants, including the Mellon Affirming Multivocal Humanities Grant, the University of California Multicampus Program Initiative Grant, the Luce Foundation Humanities Studio Grant, the University of California Humanities Research Institute Working Group Grant, and the Center for New Racial Studies Research Grant.
Joshua Shannon
is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary visual art, photography, and architecture. His publications and teaching focus on art’s relationships to social and cultural history since the Cold War period, with special interests in ecology, landscape, and cities. Professor Shannon's new book, Looking for Tomorrow: Lessons from Art for the Time of Climate Change, will appear with the University of California Press in January of 2027. Beginning from the observation that the climate crisis demands not only technical solutions but also the unlearning of some of our most basic beliefs, this book shows how the innovations of modern art can help human beings to conceive a sustainable civilization. Professor Shannon's teaching is informed by deep concerns over sustainability and justice, by critical theory, by social and cultural history, and by the practice of close looking. Topics of his current and recent courses include art and climate change, modernist architecture, photography, and concepts of the human being in contemporary art.
Jayson Maurice Porter
was born in Maryland like his great-grandmother Winona Spencer Lee (1909-2012), who worked family farm land on the Eastern Shore until the early 2000s. He is an environmental writer and historian who researches environmental histories of Mexico, the African Diaspora, food systems, agrochemicals, and environmental justice and injustice. His writing has been published in The Washington Post, Environmental Humanities, Distillations Magazine, Environment and Society, and other outlets. He is currently working on a book manuscript with Duke University Press on the environmental history of the African Diaspora, violence, and environmental change in Guerrero, Mexico through oilseeds crops, such as cotton, sesame, and coconuts. As an environmental educator, Jayson's teaching specialties extend to environmental justice history, science and technologies studies of race and resistance, and Afro-Indigenous ecologies in Latin America and the tropics more broadly. He is an editorial board member of the North American Congress for Latin America (NACLA) and Plant Perspectives: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Cy Keener
is an interdisciplinary artist who uses environmental sensing and kinetic sculpture to record and represent the natural world. He is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Emerging Technology in the Department of Art. His work includes a range of data-based installations to visualize diverse phenomena including sea ice, wind, rain and ocean waves. He received a Master of Fine Arts from Stanford University, and a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. Cy has completed commissioned installations at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Stanford University, Suyama Space in Seattle, and the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas. He is currently collaborating with the International Arctic Buoy Programme through funding from the National Science Foundation to deploy sensors in the Arctic Ocean.
Sangeeta Ray
is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the current director of the Center for Comparative Literary Studies. She teaches anglophone postcolonial literature, South Asian literature, literature from the black diaspora, and Asian American literature. Her work is always attuned to questions of gender and sexuality. Her current interests include environmental studies as well the field of refugee studies. She is primarily a literary scholar engaged in questions of form and genre, postcolonial reading practices and the relationship between aesthetics, ethics and politics. She has published two books, Engendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (Duke UP 2000) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: In other Words (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). She has served as President of a few divisions in the MLA as well as on various committees for the MLA and ACLA. She has been a past President of the Cultural Studies Association and has served two terms on the supervisory Board of the English Institute. She was President of ACLA from April 2020-April 2021. At the University she has, in the past, been the Director of the Asian American Studies Certificate Program, Director of the Cultures of the Americas, College Park Scholars Program as well as the Director of Graduate Studies in the English department.
This panel focuses on highlighting how the humanities offer crucial tools for reimagining environmental futures and addressing the slow, uneven forms of harm that often remain invisible in scientific or policy discourse. The interdisciplinary panel brings together faculty members from Art History; History; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Art; and English. Panelist will discuss how different humanistic disciplines approach environmental questions, how various forms of artistic expression illuminate ecological issues, and what it means to think collaboratively about climate change across fields. Focusing on the breadth of approaches within the humanities, the panel offers students and community members a deeper understanding of how the humanities can make environmental issues newly visible, emotionally resonant, and culturally meaningful.
Speaker Bios:
Neda Atanasoski
is Professor and Chair of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park and Associate Director of Education for the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM). Atanasoski’s interdisciplinary research has focused on feminism and AI, feminist and critical race approaches to science and technology studies, AI and the future of work, militarism, and human rights and humanitarianism. She is the author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (2013), co-author of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (2019), and co-editor of Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution (2022) and Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen (2025). Atanasoski has been the recipient of numerous grants, including the Mellon Affirming Multivocal Humanities Grant, the University of California Multicampus Program Initiative Grant, the Luce Foundation Humanities Studio Grant, the University of California Humanities Research Institute Working Group Grant, and the Center for New Racial Studies Research Grant.
Joshua Shannon
is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary visual art, photography, and architecture. His publications and teaching focus on art’s relationships to social and cultural history since the Cold War period, with special interests in ecology, landscape, and cities. Professor Shannon's new book, Looking for Tomorrow: Lessons from Art for the Time of Climate Change, will appear with the University of California Press in January of 2027. Beginning from the observation that the climate crisis demands not only technical solutions but also the unlearning of some of our most basic beliefs, this book shows how the innovations of modern art can help human beings to conceive a sustainable civilization. Professor Shannon's teaching is informed by deep concerns over sustainability and justice, by critical theory, by social and cultural history, and by the practice of close looking. Topics of his current and recent courses include art and climate change, modernist architecture, photography, and concepts of the human being in contemporary art.
Jayson Maurice Porter
was born in Maryland like his great-grandmother Winona Spencer Lee (1909-2012), who worked family farm land on the Eastern Shore until the early 2000s. He is an environmental writer and historian who researches environmental histories of Mexico, the African Diaspora, food systems, agrochemicals, and environmental justice and injustice. His writing has been published in The Washington Post, Environmental Humanities, Distillations Magazine, Environment and Society, and other outlets. He is currently working on a book manuscript with Duke University Press on the environmental history of the African Diaspora, violence, and environmental change in Guerrero, Mexico through oilseeds crops, such as cotton, sesame, and coconuts. As an environmental educator, Jayson's teaching specialties extend to environmental justice history, science and technologies studies of race and resistance, and Afro-Indigenous ecologies in Latin America and the tropics more broadly. He is an editorial board member of the North American Congress for Latin America (NACLA) and Plant Perspectives: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Cy Keener
is an interdisciplinary artist who uses environmental sensing and kinetic sculpture to record and represent the natural world. He is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Emerging Technology in the Department of Art. His work includes a range of data-based installations to visualize diverse phenomena including sea ice, wind, rain and ocean waves. He received a Master of Fine Arts from Stanford University, and a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. Cy has completed commissioned installations at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Stanford University, Suyama Space in Seattle, and the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas. He is currently collaborating with the International Arctic Buoy Programme through funding from the National Science Foundation to deploy sensors in the Arctic Ocean.
Sangeeta Ray
is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the current director of the Center for Comparative Literary Studies. She teaches anglophone postcolonial literature, South Asian literature, literature from the black diaspora, and Asian American literature. Her work is always attuned to questions of gender and sexuality. Her current interests include environmental studies as well the field of refugee studies. She is primarily a literary scholar engaged in questions of form and genre, postcolonial reading practices and the relationship between aesthetics, ethics and politics. She has published two books, Engendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (Duke UP 2000) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: In other Words (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). She has served as President of a few divisions in the MLA as well as on various committees for the MLA and ACLA. She has been a past President of the Cultural Studies Association and has served two terms on the supervisory Board of the English Institute. She was President of ACLA from April 2020-April 2021. At the University she has, in the past, been the Director of the Asian American Studies Certificate Program, Director of the Cultures of the Americas, College Park Scholars Program as well as the Director of Graduate Studies in the English department.
Tawes Hall false