an invitation
Erin Clancy | Christian Keeve | Karen Kinslow | Kallista Bley
What is critical restoration, and why is it important now? What are some of the potentialities and tensions of this concept and how can we approach critical restoration collaboratively from our respective positions, fields, and localities? By convening as a facilitated reading group, we seek to create dynamic and engaged conversations among multiple voices in the process of asking these questions. This reading group will center various thematics within the constellation of ‘critical restoration’: critical health and dis/ability studies, racial ecologies, re-story-ation, eco-speculation, more-than-humanisms, and queer ecologies.
These themes are ever-evolving, wobbly, and expansive. The wide selection of readings reflects some of the diverse and interdisciplinary ways restoration, ecologies, relations, and bodies can be thought; a working through of these together can also evoke generative frictions and resonances. As such, we welcome anyone interested in concepts of restoration, ‘health’, embodiment, and beyond to join us.
The group will meet once during the DoPE conference in February. Participants may pick and choose whichever readings they find interesting or relevant to them, although we do encourage everyone to read the ‘headwaters’ texts. We also invite engagement across platforms to share ideas before, during, and after the session.
For further questions, inquiries, or just to say wassup, feel free to email Erin (eclancy2 [at] wisc.edu), Karen (karen.kinslow [at] uky.edu), Chris (keeve [at] uky.edu), and Kallista (kbley [at] wisc.edu)
Follow the links below to learn more and sign up. For all info in one place, check out our master doc
Introduction | Meanders | Reading Lists | Call for Reciprocity | Sign Up! [registration has closed]
About the CRG Collective:
Erin Clancy is a second year PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They came to restoration through their work on eating disorders, where in clinical treatment “weight restoration” is often a primary recovery goal that often creates more harm. Beginning to make sense of the issue through a disability studies frame, the work opened up to the broader question of “restoration” in a wider ecological context. Their research interests center on feminist health geographies, disability studies, eating disorders, and affect/emotion.
Chris Keeve, often mistaken for three raccoons in a trenchcoat, is a first-year PhD student in Geography at the University of Kentucky. Their work, at the intersections of Black geographies and political ecology, has focused agrobiodiversity conservation, or the things that people do or don’t do with seeds and the things that seeds may or may not do on their own. Lately they’ve been thinking about living archives, landscape mosaics, and digital ecologies. Their turn to critical restoration is inspired by the socio-ecological infrastructures of imagining and planning, ruination and decay.
Karen Kinslow is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky. Karen is interested in place-based research that blends social theory with environmental studies. Her dissertation work examines the role of stream restoration in the Lexington, Kentucky waterscape.
Kallista Bley is a graduate student in the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Check out the forum for a full bio and introduce yourselves there too as you sign up!