We are excited to announce the launch of the Sustainable Futures Reading Group, led by Prof. Rodd. This engaging group invites all students and faculty at DKU to participate.

Sustainable Futures Reading Group: Extractivism, Metabolism, and Emancipation

Convener: Prof. Robin Rodd
Contact: rhr10@duke.edu
Time: Tuesdays, 3-4 PM
Room: WDR3002

Join Prof. Robin Rodd in exploring critical readings on sustainable futures. This group will delve into contemporary texts discussing alternatives to socially and environmentally unjust development practices and possibilities for creating sustainable forms of living. Participants from all academic backgrounds are welcome to join each week, regardless of their progress with the readings.

Reading Schedule:

• 10 September
  Toscano, Alberto. Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum. Seagull Books.
  • Ch. 3 Reform, pp. 75-83
  • Ch. 7 Resistance, pp. 133-142
  • Ch. 11 Freedom, pp. 214-234

  Romano, Onofrio. Towards a Society of Degrowth. Routledge.

  • Ch. 4 Beyond the Servile: The Society of Degrowth, pp. 82-112
• 17 September
  Chaudhary, Ajay Singh. The Exhausted Earth: Politics in a Burning World. Repeater Books.
  • Ch. 1 We’re Not in This Together, pp. 1-46
  • Ch. 2 The Extractive Circuit, pp. 47-76
  • Ch. 4 The Exhausted Earth, pp. 161-236
• 24 September
  Malm, Andreas. The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. Verso.
  • Ch. 2 On Combined Development: Against Hybridism, pp. 44-77
  • Ch. 6, Ch. 7, Ch. 8, pp. 177-231
• 8 October
  Veltmeyer, Henry & Ezquerro-Cañete (eds.). From Extractivism to Sustainability: Scenarios and Lessons from Latin America. Routledge.
  • Ch. 7 Puyana-Mutis & Rodriguez Pena, The Green Energy Transition: Expansion and Deepening of Extractivism, pp. 119-140
  • Ch. 11 Barkin, Communities in Resistance: Forging a Communitarian Revolutionary Subject, pp. 203-218
  • Ch. 12 Gudynas, Post-Extractivist Transitions: Concepts, Sequences, and Examples, pp. 221-240
  • Ch. 15 Veltmeyer & Ezquerro-Canete, Development Beyond Extractivism: Lessons and Alternate Pathways, pp. 277-300
• 15 October
  Saito, Kohei. Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto. Astra House
• 22 October
  Krause, Sharon. Eco-Emancipation: An Earthly Politics of Freedom. Princeton
• 5 November
  De Molina, Manuel González & Toledo, Victor M. The Social Metabolism: A Socio-Ecological Theory of Historical Change. 2nd Edition. Springer.
  • Ch. 3 Social Metabolism: Origins, History, Approaches, and Main Schools, pp. 47-74
  • Ch. 5 The Social and Political Basis of Social Metabolism, pp. 109-134
  • Ch. 6 The Basic Model, pp. 135-170
  • Ch. 15 Epilogue: Metabolisms, Entropy, and Sustainable Society, pp. 407-425
• 12 November
  Rozzi, R. et al. From Biocultural Homogenization to Biocultural Conservation. Springer.
  • Ch. 1 A Conceptual Framework for Reorienting Society Toward Sustainability, pp. 1-17
  • Ch. 2 Biocultural Homogenization: A Wicked Problem in the Anthropocene, pp. 21-45
  • Ch. 19 Biocultural Conservation and Biocultural Ethics, pp. 303-314
  • Ch. 20 The U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and the Biocultural Heritage Lacuna, pp. 315-331
• 19 November
  Grove, Jairus. Savage Ecology: War and Politics at the End of the World. Duke.
  • Ch. 2 War as a Form of Life, pp. 59-77
  • Ch. 7 Three Images of Transformation as Homogenization, pp. 191-225
  • Conclusion, Ratio Feritas: From Critical Responsiveness to Making New Forms of Life, pp. 273-284
• 3 December
  Kaufman, Craig & Martin, Pamela. The Politics of the Rights of Nature: Strategies for Building a More Sustainable Future. MIT Press.
  • Ch. 1-3, pp. 1-77
  • Conclusions: Earth Jurisprudence for a Sustainable Future for All, pp. 211-234

  Krenak, Ailton. Ancestral Future. Polity.

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Date & Time: May 2, 17:30 -18:30
Location: AB 1079

Description: Dr. Tâm T. T. Ngô, Senior Researcher/Associate Professor at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, part of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In the last four decades, to find, to identify, and to commemorate more than half a million fallen soldiers who died for the Vietnamese state in the three international wars that the country fought in the twentieth century, nearly the entire Vietnamese population has been mobilized. While the public face of this mass mobilization is dominantly male, the private and intimate driving force behind this work of war accounting and war memory making is saliently female. Millions of Vietnamese mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters who have been waiting, grieving, and mourning for their sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers who did not return when the wars ended. In addition to emotional pain and the psychological anguish of not knowing the faith of a missing loved one, these women also had to deal with the social, economic, legal and familial implication of the absence of their men, and often had to deal with these issues in a social context laden with patriarchal values and hierarchies. Since the 1990s, many of them joined the search for the remains and the spirits of their fallen men. This presentation sketches out a few among those million journeys to search for their male missing relatives and voice women’s perspectives about warfare and its human cost. In so doing, it aims to go beyond the uncomfortable yet established link between war and gender to restore the agentive power of women in keeping memory, healing wound and suturing the social fabrics torn by war violence.