w/ Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Ching-In Chen, Cassie Mira, and Juliana Chow

at ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) Biennial Conference

Time and Date TBA

This panel thinks about air, water, and soil as routes/roots of inhabitation and entanglements for humans and nonhumans from a diasporic perspective. Taking the atmosphere as the medium of routes/roots, we share work that both extends into the cosmic stratosphere and flows with the dynamics of the earth and its respiration through living things. We will consider how engagements with this broad conception of atmospheres can help articulate a diasporic environmental humanities. Specifically: What changes when we think about diaspora and its migrations through elemental flows? What forms of air, intimacies, and inequalities begin to come into relief with a diasporic practice? In particular, we are interested in practices of care and an environmental ethics in relation to the atmosphere. We offer the framing of the diasporic environmental humanities to think with and through atmospheric loss, rupture, and displacement. We will also explore how the diasporic environmental humanities offers ideas for care, kinship, and ancestry through thinking with the atmosphere and air.

My presentation is entitled: An Inland Sea: Ancestors, Deep Time, and Interspecies Care