Colonial, Racial, Indigenous Ecologies Working Group
Colonial, Racial, and Indigenous Ecologies (CRIE) is a working group of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University. CRIE brings together faculty and graduate students working at the conjunction of environment, culture, and critical race and Indigenous studies to gather and develop a shared research agenda. As scholars like Kyle Powys Whyte, Carolyn Finney, Julie Sze and Rob Nixon have pointed out, environmental activism and scholarship has frequently marginalized the concerns of the Indigenous, colonized, and racialized populations who are often most impacted by environmental change.
2020/2021
Stephen Legg – Spectacular and Domestic Atmospheres: India, London and 1930s Senses (co-sponsored by the Centre for Sensory Studies)
Critical Garden Studies Working Group
Critical Garden Studies is a working group of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University. This working group brings together an interdisciplinary group of faculty and students to explore the garden as a dynamic, critical, material, and imaginative microcosm for the political, performative, social, cultural, botanical, and environmental.
Critical Garden Studies acts as sites for new and interdisciplinary research methodologies that incorporate research-creation, qualitative, and quantitative methods and often prioritize embodied and experiential research. The working group will critically consider different types of garden sites such as community gardens, landscape gardens, urban wilds, botanical gardens, with attention to garden design and maintenance, creation and evolution in social-historical contexts, as well as their decision-making and organizational structure. In addition, attention will be paid to gardens as sites of pedagogy, resilience, food security and sustainability programs, as well as forms of media and artistic engagement.
2021/2022
Guess speakers included: Liz Miller/MJ Thompson (September 2020), Mitchell McLarnon (October 2020), Dance for Plants with CISSC “ATMOSPHERES” (October 2020), Carly Ziter (November 2020), Eduardo Kohn (January 2021), Krisztina Mosdossy (March 2021), and Sharon Willoughby (April 2021).
Jill Didur 