Research Cluster Event: The Aesthetics of Infrastructure/The Infrastructure of Aesthetics

Event Type

Seminar/Symposium

Sponsor

Environmental Humanities Research Cluster and the Humanities Research Institute, the Brenton and Jean Wadsworth Endowment of the Department of Landscape Architecture, Sociology, iSEE, Department of English, and Urban and Regional Planning

Location

Temple Hoyne Buell Hall

Date

Apr 21, 2022 - Apr 22, 2022   All Day

Registration

Registration required

Contact

Rebecca Oh

E-Mail

rsoh@illinois.edu

Views

239

Originating Calendar

HRI

This in-person symposium explores how infrastructure and aesthetics, as structuring forms, are being taken up in the environmental humanities. We will attend to infrastructure's aesthetic capacities, how built forms and their materials produce specific aesthetic effects and social uses, or make aesthetic perceptions available to social practice. In turn we are interested in the ways aesthetic qualities like medium, genre, narrative, or color are themselves infrastructural and shape encounters with infrastructure. These questions connect infrastructure and aesthetics to environmental and political struggles, such as those for resource security, political visibility, and access to environmental futures.

Register now. Registration is free but space is limited! Also note: registration is required for access to precirculated papers.

Thursday, April 21, 5–6:30 p.m.

225 Temple Hoyne Buell Hall

• Keynote by Brian Larkin (Anthropology, Columbia/Barnard) - "The Political Aesthetics of Light"
• Respondent: Zsuzsa Gille (UIUC, Sociology)

 

Friday, April 22

225 Temple Hoyne Buell Hall

• 8:30-9 a.m. Coffee and Opening Remarks
• 9-10:15 a.m. Rebecca Evans (English, Southwestern University) / Rebecca Oh (English, UIUC), moderated by Jamie L. Jones (English, UIUC)
• 10:30-11:45am Simi Kang (Gender Studies, University of Victoria) / Sevin Yildiz (Urban Planning and Public Affairs, UIC), moderated by Daniel Schneider (Urban and Regional Planning, UIUC). Simi will be joining us virtually.
• 11:45-1:15 p.m. Lunch Break
  
  

325 Temple Hoyne Buell Hall

• 1:15-2:30 p.m. Jessica Varner (Society of Fellows, University of Southern California) / Pollyanna Rhee (Landscape Architecture, UIUC), moderated by Julie L. Cidell (Geography and Geographic Information Science, UIUC)
• 2:30-2:45 p.m. Closing Remarks by John Levi Barnard (Comparative Literature and English, UIUC)