Lunch & Learn: Sharing the Earth: Speaking Up/Speaking Out

In the course of human history, there comes a time when humanity is called
to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground.
A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other.

—Wangari Maathai, 2004 Nobel Laureate and
Founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya

Creative work has the power to warn, to persuade, to educate, to give hope. It speaks not only to our heads but also to our hearts. Why is that crucial in our shared struggle to achieve environmental justice and planetary health? What can welearn from a truly multicultural, global set of voices? This lecture/discussion will focus on the role of literature in environmental justice activism, emphasizing the power of words to help create a sustainable and just future. Join Professors Elizabeth Ammons and Modhumita Roy to explore these important topics.

Elizabeth Ammons is the Harriet H. Fay Professor of Literature at Tufts University and teaches in the Environmental Studies Program, “Environmental Justice and U.S. Literature” and also serves as an academic advisor in the program. She is a prolific author including her most recent book, Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet (2010), which foregrounds issues of environmental justice and activism in American literature and the humanities in general.

Modhumita Roy has been an Associate Professor of English since 1998 and will begin advising in the Environmental Studies Program in 2012. She served as the Director of Women’s Studies at Tufts University from 2004-2011 and received the Sophie Coe Memorial Prize for “Some Like it Hot: Gender, Class and Empire in the Making of Mulligatawney Soup” from the Oxford Symposium on Food and cookery, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford in 2008. Some of her written works include, “Labour Pain: ‘Nannygate’, Undocumented Workers and the Social Cost of “Mothering’ in Contemporary Cultural Texts” (2012) and “Foreign Babies/ Indian Make: Outsourcing Reproduction in the Age of Globalisation” in Locating Cultural Change: Theory, Method, Process (2011).

For updated information on this and other ENVS Lunch & Learns, see the ENVS website.