Past Symposium: Spring 2014

This symposium brings together four scholars, each from a different discipline, to speak about the relationship between modernity and sustainability.  Each speaker, drawing on his or her own research, will be asked to answer this question: is modernity inherently hostile to sustainability or not?  Such a question deliberately raises the prospect of multiple “modernities,” about which speakers will offer critical analysis.  Although modern societies have often disregarded the environmental impacts of their endeavors, modernity has also made possible ideas about ecology, environmental justice, and sustainable human existence.  By considering examples of environmental activism generated within (or against) industrial society, the symposium will ask which of these serve as credible and practical models of sustainability around the world now.

Speakers:

Natural and Cultural Histories:
Landscape Architecture as a Regenerative Practice or,
The Rights of Nature Amid the Particularities of People and Place
Warren T. Byrd, Jr.
Professor Emeritus, School of Architecture, University of Virginia
Principal, Nelson Byrd Woltz, Landscape Architects

Connecting Environmentalism to Democracy through Environmental Stewardship
Dana R. Fisher
Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of The Program for Society and the Environment, University of Maryland

Casualties of Modernity: Road­killed Animals and the Question of Sustainability
Linda Monahan
Ph.D. Candidate, American Studies Program, College of William and Mary

Concluding Remarks:
Paul Outka
Associate Professor of English, University of Kansas and Immediate Past President, Association for the Study of Literature and Environment

Chair:
Alan C. Braddock
Ralph H. Wark Associate Professor of Art History and American Studies, The College of William and Mary