Seventy-six years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Shoah remains a crucial caesura in modern thought. In its wake, questions of ethics and aesthetics converge, demanding continuous engagement: What are the limits of representation in the face of catastrophe? How is it possible to give voice to the experience of suffering without exploitation? And in how far can art do justice to historical realities?

This project examines the history of the San Francisco 8, a collection of eight former members of the Black Panther Party (BPP) arrested in January 2007 for the 1971 homicide of San Francisco Police Sergeant John Young. Authorities jailed the men and held them on bonds ranging from three to five million dollars. Austin will examine the reasons behind the arrests, the history of the men’s involvement in the BPP and the years of legal battles they faced before a California court dismissed the charges in 2011.

This book project contextualizes the current drug violence within a longer 20th-century history of failed state formation, persistent social inequality and political violence. Using declassified Mexican and U.S. military and intelligence documents and oral histories, Aviña locates the immediate origins of the current bloodletting in the early 1970s when state drug interdiction campaigns became for the first time fully and permanently militarized.

Water, more than oil, is projected to be at the center of the world’s struggles in the twenty-first century, and "City of Water" is a case study for the need to harness the enduring might of poetry to generate, sustain and promote collective narratives for the protection of nonhuman aquatic environment, especially within the city. 

The production of globally sustainable futures today depends on the scientific research that is being done around the deep ocean, and on how regulators respond to pressures to extract from, transform and control the seabed. Taking into account these developments, Han’s project traces how the production of media technologies like seismology, autonomous gliders and cabled seafloor observatories have worked in the shadow of extractive industries like offshore drilling and deep sea mining. 

This project explores the primary social and political issues driving women to become Rastafari and organize in their communities, examines the ways they combat the triple marginality of being Rastafari, Black and women and analyzes how their international travel forges relationships between Africans and African Diasporans.

“The Unsung Planet” provides a critical examination of the complex relationships that exist between sound and the environment and invites readers into a more attentive awareness of the sonic dimensions of the Earth.

The song produced by comet 67P/C-G throws into stark relief the importance for thinking otherwise about the significance we place on human thought, human experience and human action in articulating the hyper-objective scale and deep time of our many complex sustainability issues and for engaging responses to these issues in some way.