Critical Pathways Autumn Fellows 2024
With great enthusiasm we announce the upcoming visit of this year’s four Critical Pathways Fellows: Brian Burkhart, Andrea Lampis, Namrata Narendra, and Angie Vanessita. They will be joining us at Utrecht University at various times between mid-November and mid-December.
All the fellows are eager to use their time in Utrecht to expand and strengthen their networks by meeting people working in their areas of expertise, both within our university and beyond. We fully support them in this endeavor. If you are interested in meeting with one or more of the fellows, we strongly encourage you to reach out to us using the e-mail address criticalpathways@uu.nl, and we will assist in facilitating contact.
Dr. Brian Burkhart (visiting 18 November - 1 December) is an Associate Professor of Philosophy, affiliate faculty in Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma, and director of the Native Nations Center. His research specializes in Native American and Indigenous philosophy, specifically Indigenous land-based conceptions of well-being and environmental ethics. His 2019 book, Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land: A Trickster Methodology for Decolonizing Environmental Ethics and Indigenous Futures, argues that land is key to both the operations of coloniality as well as the anti-colonial power that grounds Indigenous liberation. Land, as a material, conceptual, and ontological foundation for Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and valuing, provides a framework for Indigenous environmental ethics that can also function as an anti-colonial force for sovereign Indigenous futures. His current book project, As Strong as the Land that Made You: Native American and Indigenous Philosophies of Well-Being through the Land, extends these land-based methodologies into reflections on both environmental and individual health for Native people and Native Nations. Burkhart is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma with roots in the Jaybird Creek community of Northeastern Oklahoma as well as the Indian Wells community of the Navajo Nation in Arizona. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Indiana University.
On 20 November 2024, 15h00-17h00, Brian Burkhart will provide a workshop titled Decolonizing and Indigenizing Sustainability through the Land. Find all information on the workshop here.
On 26 November 2024, 15h00-17h00, Burkhart will organize a lecture on Indigenous Visions of Law and Ecocide. Find all information on that lecture here.
Angie Vanessita (visiting 16 November - 30 November) is a mother, illustrator, designer, activist, environmentalist, and Colombian feminist. For more than fifteen years, she has been working with grassroot associations and collectives to create graphic materials for the defense of territories, human rights, and the rights of nature. My illustrations have supported social and environmental struggles across Latin America. Vanessita believes in graphic art as a conscious and powerful tool that bridges academia and social action. During her stay in Utrecht, she will be creating a mural in collaboration with social and agroecology collectives in Utrecht. She will also hold an exhibition on environmentalist illustration.
Andrea Lampis (visiting 25 November - 8 December) is a Full Professor at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), School of Politics, Economics and Business (EPPEN). With two post-doctorates from the Institute of Energy and Environment (IEE/USP) and the Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP), and a PhD in Social Policy from the London School of Economics, his research explores the governance and justice implications of socio-technical transitions.
During the Critical Pathways Fellowship at Utrecht University in November 2024, Andrea will lead the Reparation Ecologies Lab and Seminar. The Lab, a two-day event, will gather diverse Dutch reparation initiatives to discuss the core questions of reparation ecology: What needs repair, who are the agents, what are the mechanisms, and at what scale should reparation occur? The Seminar will engage participants in a rigorous discussion of reparation practices, informed by diverse global experiences and case studies, aimed at fostering applied knowledge for social, environmental, gender, and racial justice.
Namrata Narendra (visiting 24 November - 7 December) is an artist and urban researcher from Bangalore, India. She is interested in exploring human-environment collaborations and contestations within our immediate natural and constructed landscapes. Employing mixed mediums such as ethnographic research, collective mapping, visual inquiry and storytelling during the Critical Pathways Fellowship, she aims to document these complex interactions and create meaningful dialogue around them. Documentations are diverse in their form- visual art, symbols, oral histories, written word, cartography, audio, film, virtual reality. How do these representations capture the fluidity and dynamism of the various pathways of constructed human infrastructures in diversely speciated landscapes? Using this as a point of departure she wants to nudge thought towards non-anthropocentric comparative dialogues of socio-environmental transformation in the Netherlands to post-colonial countries in the Global South. She will host interactive sessions to facilitate conversations through participatory art based workshops and physical and virtual transect walks with a focus on water infrastructure.