Events

Wes Gillingham, Program Director of Catskill Mountainkeeper, uses the Watershed Model to illustrate the potential impact of fracking of NYC’s water supply.

Shifting strategies–from denialism to obfuscation, advertising, and public relations–mislead the public. People become cynical and uncertain, mistrusting of any and all efforts to confront the changing climate. With science under attack, what is to be done? How might we break through the propaganda fog and into collective action?

Corporate sponsorship of museums and science education can compromise the basic idea of museums as reliable sources of common knowledge. By considering historical as well as contemporary examples of museum funding, we look at the power structures embedded in practices of collecting and display.

Institutional critique expresses and comes up against the limits of the institution. How are activist artists borrowing the vocabulary of the museum and in so doing extending the political potential already dividing the institution from within?

This panel explores the ways in which language functions to structure thought and action, as well as how struggles over language can be part of a collective project of decolonization. Together, panelists will explore the modes of communication through which people have come to discover and assert their collective difference in the world.