Keynote Panel for the 2025 UC Graduate Student Conference

REGISTER: https://ucr.zoom.us/meeting/register/lHJxMpWMSu60N5Fv3mqyZw 

This facilitated discussion with J. Kameron Carter (Dept. of African American Studies, Comparative Literature, and Religion, UC Irvine), Francesca Hopkins (Dept. of Environmental Sciences, UC Riverside), Mark Minch-de Leon (Director of California Center for Native Nations, Dept. of English, UC Riverside) and Brittani R. Orona (UC President's and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept. of History, University of California, Santa Cruz) will offer a sequence of urgent, real-time analytical responses to the ongoing California wildfires. How is this still-unfolding disaster a singular and/or continuous moment in the historical geography of California? How do different epistemological, archival and theoretical frameworks inform or challenge prevalent discourses of disaster, recovery, survival, community and (climate) crisis? Departing from these and other questions, the roundtable will attempt to build on the concept of “entanglement” in the context of asymmetric displacement, destruction and (human, animal, ecological) vulnerability. 

Co-Facilitated by Fariba Zarinebaf (Chair of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Dept. of History, UC Riverside) and Dylan Rodríguez (Co-Director of Center for Ideas and Society, Depts. of Black Study and Media & Cultural Studies, UC Riverside).

Panelists:

J. Kameron Carter
Professor of African American Studies
Comparative Literature & Religious Studies, UC Irvine

Francesca M. Hopkins
Associate Professor of Climate Change and Sustainability
Environmental Sciences, UCR

Mark Minch-de Leon (He/Him/His)
Assistant Professor
Director of the California Center for Native Nations (CCNN)
English, UCR

Brittani R. Orona, Ph.D. (Hupa) (she/her/hers)
UC President's and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
History, UC Santa Cruz

Sponsored by the UCR Center for Ideas and Society, UC Humanities Research Institute, through a Multi-Campus Research Program grant from the UC Office of the President, Health Humanities and Disability Justice (HHDJ) Initiative, and the Decolonizing Humanism(?) Initiative.