Unraveling the Anthropocene: Race, Environment, and Pandemic Liberal Arts Collective

A special episode featuring LAC's April 2022 roundtable event (Co)Figurations of Care: Experience and Infrastructure in the Medical Humanities, featuring Anna Ulrikke Andersen, MK Czerwiec, and Victoria Lupascu. This roundtable discussed care and its multiple and diverse configurations. Care ranges from looking after a patient, to being attuned to the needs of the self and its surroundings, to reorganizing the built medical environment. Our speakers' work reflects on the biopolitical management of health, medical spatial organization, and personal or fictional narratives of care. How do visual art, architecture, and medical technologies can produce, contest, configure and disseminate spatial and embodied forms of knowledge, and call attention to care? (Moderated by Merve Şen)
More information on the event & speakers can be found on the LAC website here.

A special episode featuring LAC's March 2022 roundtable event (Co)Figurations of Experience: Ecocritical Approaches to Virtual Worlds, featuring Alenda Y. Chang, Jonathan Correa, Kathryn Hamilton (a.k.a. Sister Sylvester), and Deniz Tortum. This roundtable explored the ecocritical dimensions of digital and virtual environments. Through an interdisciplinary approach to video games, pedagogy, VR, and contemporary art, what possible future(s) are envisioned by and through the experience of virtual worlds? (Moderated by Hannah A. Matangos)
More information on the event & speakers can be found on the LAC website here.

In this episode, LAC member Merve Tabur interviews Penn State professor Mark Sentesy. Sentesy introduces his research in philosophical anthropology and the Anthropocene and discusses how ancient views on human relationship to nature compare to our modern-day conceptions. Underscoring the significance of a philosophical understanding of environmental justice concerns today, Sentesy also shares his pedagogical approaches to teaching climate ethics.

In this episode, LAC member Müge Gedik interviews Dr. Özlem Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu. Dr. Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu discusses her new book project Shamanism in the Contemporary Novel: Histories of Lands, Animals, and Peoples beyond the Nature/Culture Divide on shamanism in contemporary literature, encompassing Northern Siberia, China, North America, Australia, and Turkey. She highlights the importance of kinship and forging ties with other human and more-than-human life forms as resistance to overextraction and global capitalist discourses. Lastly, we explore the current trends, studies, and communities in literature and environment and environmental humanities in Turkey.

In this episode, LAC member Merve Tabur interviews Dr. Gizem Yılmaz Karahan. Dr. Yılmaz Karahan discusses her research on written and visual representations of disease and contagion in the writings of the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi (1611-1682) and in the medical illustrations of an Ottoman surgeon, Şerafeddin Sabuncuğlu (1385-1468). Putting ancient Greek, Arab, and Ottoman Turkish philosophies and scientific discourses in conversation with contemporary discussions on posthumanism and material ecocriticism, Dr. Yılmaz Karahan underlines the significance of historical and cross-cultural analyses in addressing ecological and public health issues today.  

LAC member Michelle McGowan interviews Francisco Guevara, a visual artist and curator. Guevara specializes in Levinasian ethics applied to the design of cross-cultural artistic projects as well as the analysis of performativity in contemporary art practices. He has over 20 years of experience designing, curating, managing arts projects, and promoting social change. Guevara is co-founder and Co-Executive Director of Arquetopia, a non-profit foundation and transnational artist residency program promoting development and social transformation through educational, artistic, and cultural programming.