Workshop: Historical and Contemporary Articulations of Race and Environment

The workshop is intentionally broad in scope in order to accommodate a wide range of participant interests, while also engaging the question of how a transdisciplinary or nondisciplinary, decolonial mode of enquiry might “fit” within—or unsettle—the boundaries of academic disciplines. In this sense, it asks how such articulations can be navigated from the perspectives of Philosophy, History, Geography, and/or Politics, particularly when these are not treated as discrete domains of knowledge.
Framed in this way, the workshop approaches race–environment relations not as fixed or given, but as products of ongoing historical processes that shape both the uneven impacts of climate change and the solutions proposed in response.

Indicative themes for discussion and proposed inputs include:

• Shift from environmental determinism to environmental possibilism in the context of 
transformationism, including the link between environmental engineering and 
narratives of social progress (Bromber et al. 2015; Henni 2022)
• Colonial narratives about how the world’s “natives” / “poor” mismanage resources 
(Ahuja 2021), and their persistence in green developmentalism and carbon forestry in 
the Global South
• Climate change as a geophysical effect of race (Yusoff 2021)
• Infrastructure as a developmental fix, particularly in the post-World War II period 
(Anand et al. 2018; Sharma 2020)
• “Passive” or “active” forms of infrastructural violence (Rodgers and O’Neil 2012)
• Environmental racism (Pulido 2015, 2016)
• Colonial and racial subjugation in the reproduction of climate finance, including the 
role of differential responsibility and disproportionate vulnerability to climate change
• Racialised futures, narratives of climate migration (Ahuja 2021; Baldwin 2022), and 
the monstrous normality of “loss and damage” 

Provisional Program

10:00-10:30 Welcome & Introductions
10:30-11:45 Screening The Age of Water
11:45-12:00 Coffee Break
12:00-13:15 Presentation & Discussion on Racial Hydro-Social Formations led by Katerina 
Genidogan (featuring two cases emanating from large-scale infrastructure development 
projects: one concerning fossil water extraction for agricultural irrigation purposes in 
Guanajuato, Mexico, and another one concerning the Akosombo dam and the creation of Lake 
Volta in Ghana)
1:15-2:15 Working Groups and Plenary Discussion
2:15-2:45 Lunch Break
2:45-4:15 Discussion on Environmental Debt as Unpayable Debt led by Katerina Genidogan
and Rosalie Arendt
4:15-4:30 Coffee Break
4:30-6:00 Online Presentation and Discussion with Pavithra Vasudevan on her co-authored text 
“Storytelling Earth and Body” and upcoming book A Toxic Alchemy: Race and Waste in 
Industrial Capitalism, dealing with environmental racism in North Carolina, US
 

Speakers
 

Rosalie Arendt is an Assistant Professor at the University of Twente, where she leads
research on the effectiveness and politics of environmental accounting especially 
environmental neutrality claims. Her work critically examines how we measure, value, and 
offset environmental impacts -like carbon, biodiversity and water- and how these methods 
shape the ambition and integrity of sustainability policies.

Katerina Genidogan holds a joint PhD from Erasmus School of Philosophy and the 
Institute of Culture and Society at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Her research lies at the 
intersection of postcolonial, black, environmental and critical development studies. Drawing 
an environmental history of development from a philosophy of science perspective, her thesis 
articulated the historical contingencies that circumscribe the non/human violent r(el)ationality 
of colonial and post-colonial forms of dispossession that are often overlooked in current 
analyses of climate change, its impacts, and solutions. She is currently developing a new project 
on environmental debt, which attempts to map the racial logics of climate policy, particularly 
looking at cases of carbon forestry and climate insurance.

Pavithra Vasudevan is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in 
the Department of African & African Diaspora Studies and the newly formed Department of 
Women’s & Gender Studies. Her scholarship and teaching are concerned with how racialized 
peoples and landscapes are devalued in capitalism and the abolitional possibilities of collective 
struggle. Her work addresses how race and waste are interwoven in contemporary racial 
capitalism and capitalist entanglements with the state and science. Her book manuscript in 
progress theorizes the relationship of Blackness to industrial capitalism through an 
ethnographically grounded examination of aluminum smelting in the Southern US company 
town of Badin, North Carolina.

Participation
If you would like to participate please send an email by the 27th of May to 
katerinagenidogan@gmail.com with a paragraph explaining your interest in the workshop
(150-200 words), and a short bio (50 words). Please include an example of a particular case 
study you would like to think through the workshop and/or discuss about in the working groups.