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New Lenses
Inspiration & exchange across the disciplines
For the last few years, many of us have deeply missed the good company of our colleagues. This series—a joint initiative of the UI College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, and the Office of the Vice President for Research—aims to re-inspire and reconnect us.
For each gathering in the Wide Lens series, researchers, scholars, and artists from across the university will briefly present their work on a shared topic of interest (pecha kucha–style). Then, we'll open the floor to questions and conviviality over hors d'oeuvres and drinks.
Wide Lens is sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, and the Office of the Vice President for Research. These events are free and open to all.
Wide Lens: CLIMATE
Thursday, April 25, 2024
4:00–5:30 p.m.
Old Capitol Senate Chambers
Rising seas, toxic rivers, deforestation, smoke-filled air—headlines remind us daily of the local, national, and international impacts of climate change. Join us for a wild pecha kucha ride through the effects of climate change with researchers who also tirelessly seek solutions. World-renowned climate scientist, Jerald Schnoor will open with big picture issues. That will set the stage for artist Isabel Barbuzza’s work on South American lithium salt mines, environmental literary scholar Eric Gidal’s work on Iowa’s watersheds, feminist anthropologist Meena Khandelwal’s engagement with Rajasthani villages in India, natural resource economist Silvia Secchi’s rooting into the farms and rivers that surround us. Together, our Wide Lens presenters offer crucial insights into the challenges we face and hope that if we work together, change is possible.
Free and open to all; no RSVP necessary.
Presentations:
- "Climate Change—Where We Are Now" — Jerald Schnoor, College of Engineering
- "Adapting Agriculture, Land, and Water to Climate Change" — Silvia Secchi, Geographical and Sustainability Sciences, CLAS
- "Visualizing Climate Dangers—The Case of Lithium" — Isabel Barbuzza, Art and Art History, CLAS
- "Cookstoves and Climate Change in India" — Meena Khandelwal, Anthropology and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, CLAS
- "Connecting Data and Storytelling in Iowa's Watersheds" — Eric Gidal, English, CLAS
20 slides per presenter, 20 seconds per slide
Ruthless Timekeeper — Teresa Mangum, Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, Office of the Vice President for Research
Additional Hosts — Roland Racevskis, Associate Dean for the Arts and Humanities, CLAS; Kristy Nabhan-Warren, Associate Vice President for Research in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
Presenters:
Isabel Barbuzza
Isabel Barbuzza is Professor in Sculpture and Intermedia and is the Studio Art Chair in the School of Art & Art History. She received a BFA and MFA in sculpture, printmaking, and book arts from the University of California-Santa Barbara. She taught sculpture, printmaking, and book arts while at UCSB. She has had exhibitions in Santa Barbara, Calif.; St. Petersburg, Russia; New York, N.Y.; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Ontario, Canada, to name a few.
Jerald Schnoor
Jerald Schnoor is the Allen S. Henry Chair in Engineering and the Co-Director of the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research. A National Academy of Engineering member, he was one of the first individuals to investigate the ability of plants to take up toxic organic chemicals and other pollutants and to apply the phytoremediation process, to clean up contaminated hazardous waste sites; thus initiating a new green technology for the treatment of contaminated soils and improving and protecting the quality of groundwater.
Schnoor is a member of the National Academy of Engineering for his pioneering work using mathematical models in science policy decisions. He has focused his engineering talents and much of his career on human management decisions to improve water quality and sustainability, culminating in the prestigious 2010 Clarke Prize from the National Water Research Association. He has also testified several times before Congress on the environmental effects of acid deposition and the importance of passing the 1990 Clean Air Act.
Eric Gidal
Eric Gidal teaches courses in environmental literary studies, public humanities, and European literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with emphases in media studies, information theory, and environmental history. His most recent book, Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age (Virginia UP, 2015), explores a modern quest to locate vestiges of ancient poetry in the landscapes of an industrial world. His more recent publications continue to study the intersections of environmental and literary history in Scottish and French romanticism. He has also published several co-authored articles that apply methods from geographical information science, computational linguistics, and network modelling to the print archive of Scottish industrialization.
Silvia Secchi
Silvia Secchi is interested in the nexus between humans and the environment, the tools and methodologies we use to understand it, the policies we adopt to change it, and the pedagogy of teaching it.
She writes, "Specifically, most of my work focuses on the Mississippi River Basin—I have done research on land based energy production, water quality, adaptation to climate change, floodplain management, invasive species and farmers’ attitudes in the watershed. I believe in place-based education. Studying multiple aspects of the complex relationship between humans and the Great River has given me a very rich lens through which to learn, research and teach a system approach to address environmental problems.
I am trained as a natural resource economist, and I identify as an economist, a geographer and a transdisciplinary scholar. My research typically involves many collaborators from other disciplines, and it integrates economic, geographical, and environmental models."
Meena Khandelwal
Meena Khandelwal is a feminist anthropologist known for her pioneering research on Hindu celibacy and monastic life that puts gender at the center. Her book Women in Ochre Robes (SUNY Press 2004) focuses on the everyday lives of women initiated into sannyasa—one of several Hindu renunciant traditions. More recently, Khandelwal has turned her attention to wood-burning cookstoves in India (chulhas in Hindi), the women who build and use them, and the outsiders to try to improve or replace them. These stoves have long been targeted for intervention by national and international institutions because of their association with indoor air pollution, fuel scarcity, women’s oppression, deforestation, and now climate change. Modernizers have been promoting "improved" biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have largely been dismayed to find their carefully engineered stoves abandoned in trash heaps or repurposed as storage bins, while the chulha retains its place in the kitchen. Chulhas continue to be used in many households that have acquired "improved" biomass stoves, or even gas or electric cooking devices. Khandelwal is currently writing a book, Cookstove Chronicles: Feminist Fieldnotes on a Local Technology in India, that answers the questions: Why do so many Indian women continue to use their wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves when they have other options? And is their loyalty to the chulha a bad thing?