In this episode, you’ll hear from Emily Eaton, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Scott Stoneman, Mark Simpson and Penelope Plaza about our relationships to the places we know and care about, and about our discrete approaches to breaking the spell of fossil capitalism, petroculture, oil — the dominant energy regime of our time.
To give you a sense of who you’ll be listening to: Mark Simpson hosts this discussion. Mark is a settler scholar and professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta (Treaty Six/Métis Territory). His work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Radical Philosophy, Postmodern Culture, and English Studies in Canada, among other venues. Emily Eaton is a professor in the department of geography and environmental studies at the University of Regina, in Treaty Four. She is a white settler whose research and teaching looks at the climate and inequality crises at local and national scales. Emily’s the author of two books: Fault Lines: Life and Landscape in Saskatchewan's Oil Economy and Growing Resistance: Canadian Farmers and the Politics of Genetically-Modified Wheat. Eva-Lynn Jagoe is a professor at University of Toronto, where she teaches cinema, literature, creative writing, and environment in the Spanish Department and in Comparative Literature. She is the author of Take Her, She's Yours. Penelope Plaza is a Venezuelan architect and researcher. Through her profession in the arts and urban activism Penelope developed an interest in the intersections between politics, culture, architecture and urban space.
Our conversation focuses on not just a love of the land, but stubborn attachments to particular uses of the land. Ways of cultivating, caring for, and working the land that have complex histories and serious consequences. We talk about the language of maintenance, both in terms of the maintenance of infrastructure, and in the context of a larger push for a culture of care that sees us taking a backseat to the land’s understanding of itself.
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