March 22, 2023 | The Power of Community: How Randolph, AZ used its History to fight for its Future
Two of Randolph AZ's citizens discuss the “David vs. Goliath” win, stopping Salt River Project's planned expansion to surround the town with toxic infrastructure. Participants: Curtis Austin, associate professor of History, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (SHPRS), ASU (moderator), Susan Wright, Randolph resident, Ron Jordan, Randolph resident, Rev. Dr. Warren Stewart, senior pastor of the First Institutional Baptist Church, Phoenix, Steve Brittle has over 30 years of experience in environmental and environmental justice issues in Arizona, and served as policy advisor for Corporation Commissioner Sandra Kennedy. The event will take place at the First Institutional Baptist Church in Phoenix.
March 18, 2023 | Listening to the Land: Engaging with the Desert Landscape with Arizona State University humanities scholar Melissa Nelson (member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians), ASU acoustic ecologist Garth Paine, and ASU Natural History Museum biologist Elizabeth Makings. Participants will learn how to see and engage with the desert landscape from multiple perspectives through narrative and embodied experience. Dr. Nelson will discuss indigenous narrative and ways of knowing, seeing, and interacting with the landscape. Paine will lead participants in exercises in listening—attuning to the acoustic ecology of a place—from urban sounds to those of animals and winds and even air. Making will help us identify a range of desert plants and explain their growing patterns.
November 19, 2022 | You Are Here: Way Finding and Emergency Preparedness with Arizona Hiking Shack Instructor, Jon Mincks and Matthew Toro Director of Map and Geospatial Services at ASU. Toro and Broglio will provide an introduction to the cultural history and power of maps. What gets mapped, how places are named, and what is left off of maps tells us much about culture. Jon Mincks will provide instruction on orienteering using a map and compass. Toro and Broglio will engage participants in the relationship between representations of space and experience in a place.
November 5, 2022 | Knowing Rocks with ASU's Dean Jeffrey Cohen, author of "Stone" and ASU geologist Linda Lorraine Carnes, and ASU artist Erika Hanson. Participants will learn how to see and engage with rocks from the perspective of philosophy, art, and science and how these disciplines come together to create our cultural understanding of our surroundings. Ron Broglio will provide an introduction and conclusion to the humanities frame for the event.
2022-2023 | Desert Experiences
October 22, 2022: Smart Hiking with Arizona Hiking Shack Instructor, Jon Mincks. Ron Broglio will provide an introduction as to how hiking attunes people to their surroundings, aids mental and physical health, and creates personal investment in the local environment. Mincks will provide basics on how to hike safely including maps, hydration and nutrition, things to enjoy and notice on hikes (basics of flora and geology), and how to handle emergency situations.
2022-2023 | Art and Humanities
Environmentally engaged art provides an affective understanding of our surroundings. It helps us care about and care for the world around us. Desert Humanities is in conversations with the Desert X and ASU Art Museum to provide site specific desert information and experiences to curators, docents, and artists. The goal is to assist in the production of the Desert X biennial and to link the work done in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts.
Partners: Desert X and the ASU Art Museum
Outcomes: assist in the production of the Desert X biennial
2022 | Property Rights for Wildlife
We are launching a public conversation about granting property rights for animals. Giving animals the right to access lands will advance the well-being of animals, ecologies, and human engagement with the more-than-human-world. The project works with lawyers, public policy groups, philosophers, and artists to expand the Overton window of what is thinkable and doable for the well-being of citizens and our environment.
Partners: Karen Bradshaw ASU law professor and author of Wildlife as Property Owners
Outcomes: working groups and outcomes are in-progress, a Washington DC event is planned for Fall 2022
2021-2022 | Desert Feelz
After talking with national park rangers, they presented us with a problem: people hiking through and living in the desert often don not know what to do in open desert space beyond snapping the requisite beautiful social media picture of the landscape. To help us with this problem, we invited New York artist Marina Zurkow to work with us. We are creating a structural system of image-and-text cards that invites visitors and locals to engage in new ways with the Sonoran Desert.
Partners: Marina Zurkow
Outcomes: cards for engaging the desert forthcoming September 2022
2018 | Dust and Shadow
By addressing the mythical and experiential underpinnings of contemporary life in the desert, we invite emotional engagement with abstract concepts, such as desertification, climate weirding, and attunements. We design participatory experiences and experimental publications, as evocative propositions for re-alignment of urban and desert ecosystems.
Partners: ASU Center for Philosophical Technologies, FoAM a Copenhagen design and futurist collective
Outcomes: Acoustic ecology vinyl album, acoustic ecology listening salon at Hayden Library, desert sound walk with The Museum of Walking + FoAM
2019 | Salt River Water Walk
Water is life. Sharon Day of the Ojibwe nation performs a five-day sacred water walk along the Salt River, from its headwaters near Roosevelt Dam, through Phoenix, to its confluence with the Gila River west of the city. Tribal members, ASU faculty, students, and staff, and members of the public join in sections of the walk to honor the river, respect water, and engage with this indigenous ceremony.
Partners: ASU Museum of Walking, Sharon Day of Nibi Walks, Heard Museum
Outcomes: five-day sacred water walk, Salt River Water Walk a documentary short film (screened in over 20 US and Canada film festivals), Herd Museum talk by Sharon Day