This event will explore the question of energy democracy and the need for a just and ecological transition away from the ongoing crises of capitalist and colonial climate catastrophe. The scholar-activist conversation will also offer a debrief and strategizing conversation from an organizing, design, and policy perspective on recent Green New Deal initiatives such as The Climate & Community Project’s report, “A New Era of Public Power”.
Please RSVP here.
Please note, out of concern for everyone’s well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic, we require attendees of our in-person events to wear masks at all times. Admission to this event requires advance reservation and proof of vaccination. Seating is limited so that we may safely gather according to a social distancing protocol. Event registrations will be honored until 15 mins after start time of the event; afterwards, availabilty will be on a first-come basis.
Billy Fleming is the founding Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Center in the Weitzman School of Design, a senior fellow with Data for Progress, and codirector of the "climate + community project." He is coeditor of Design With Nature Now (Lincoln, 2019) and A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation (Island Press, 2021). He is the lead author of "An Atlas for the Green New Deal" and his writing has been published in Places Journal, Dissent Magazine, Jacobin, The Atlantic, and The Guardian, among others.
Ashley Dawson is Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the English Department at the Graduate Center / City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. His latest books include People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R, 2016). A member of the Social Text Collective and the founder of the CUNY Climate Action Lab, he is a long-time climate justice activist.
Knar Gavin (they/any) is the Poetic Practice Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania where they are completing a dissertation about representations of environmental crisis in contemporary US poetry. Knar is a poet, teacher, and environmental justice organizer, and their chapbook, Vela., is available through the Operating System. Recent poems can be found in West Branch and Perpetual Doom, and their essay on ‘climate grief’ is in the inaugural issue of Annulet: A Journal of Poetics.
Emma Glasser is an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania studying Materials Science and Engineering and Environmental Science. She has worked at APPRISE, Resources for the Future, the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, and the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative. This work has included research on energy affordability, decarbonization technologies and policies, the economic impacts of wildfires on water quality, and the Green New Deal. Her passions revolve around climate justice and community organizing. They organize with the student led climate justice group Fossil Free Penn, the abolitionist collective Police Free Penn, and spent the summer of 2021 with the Indigenous led resistance to stop Line 3, a tar sands pipeline.
Cover art: "Listen to the Plants," Mary Tremonte (2016)
