Climate Change, Climate Change Refugees and Public Art

Monday, January 22, 2018 - 5:00pm

Dr. Christina Gerhardt

Associate Professor, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Visiting Scholar 2017-2018 – UC Berkeley

Williams Hall 623, Humanities Conference Room

Christina Gerhardt is Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley and Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities, Film and German Studies at the University of Hawaii. She is the author of Atlas of (Remote) Islands and Sea Level Rise and the editor of Climate Change, Hawaii and the Pacific.  She is also an environmental journalist, covering the annual UN climate negotiations, renewable energy and related legislation and direct action. This writing has been published under "Tina Gerhardt" in venues such as ClimateProgress.org, grist.org, The Nation, The Progressive and the Washington Monthly.   She has been awarded grants from the Fulbright Commission, the DAAD and the NEH. She has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, the Free University Berlin and Columbia University and taught previously at the University of California at Berkeley.  Her writing has been published in the journals Capitalism, Nature and Socialism, Cineaste, Environmental Humanities, Film Criticism, Film Quarterly, German Studies Review, Humanities, Mosaic, New German Critique, Quarterly Review of Film and Video and Wide Screen and in the edited volumes Water: An Atlas; and My Ocean Guide.In "Let Them Drown," the 2016 London Edward W. Said lecture, Naomi Klein called attention, as Rob Nixon's Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor had done, to the nexus of climate change, (colonial) racism and poverty. But she shifted the spotlight onto the oft-overlooked low-lying island nations. And their current day situation is dire. In "Climate Change, Climate Change Refugees and Public Art," Professor Christina Gerhardt presents how climate change has fueled social uprisings and makes life untenable in certain parts of the globe. It is one of the factors motivating migration, yet frameworks for acknowledging the existence of climate change refugees vary. Professor Gerhardt will discuss the status and upsides and downsides of the term. And she will frame and reframe perceptions of climate change impacts and their relationship to the ongoing refugee crisis. And she will discuss public art that brings attention to the nexus of sea level rise and climate change refugees.