2025 Humanities Symposium: Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor
Keynote Address, "The Great Uprooting: Migration and Movement in the Age of Climate
Change"
by Amitav Ghosh
Thursday, March 13, 2025
McGuire Hall
Andrew White Student Center
6:30 PM
"It has long been predicted that climate change will lead to large-scale displacements of population and mass migration. Is it possible to look at the European ‘migrant crisis’ of recent years through this prism? This, and many other related questions, prompted me to travel to migrant camps in Italy in 2017, to interview migrants whose languages I am familiar with: that is to say speakers of Bengali, Hindi, Urdu and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic. This talk is an attempt to identify some of the underlying patterns in the stories I was told by the migrants, in their own languages."
This year's Symposium text is Ghosh's non-fiction work, The Great Derangement, which explores the climate crisis through multiple disciplinary lenses. In three
short chapters: Stories, History, and Politics, which also address art, colonialism,
and Laudato Si among other topics, Ghosh interweaves reflections on how we are constrained
by our current modes of thinking and how we might find a way forward.
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria. Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated
into more than thirty languages and he has served on the juries of the Locarno and
Venice film festivals. The Great Derangement was given the inaugural Utah Award for the Environmental Humanities in 2018. His essays
have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times. Amitav Ghosh holds four Lifetime Achievement awards and five honorary doctorates.
In 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honors, by the President
of India. In 2010 he was a joint winner, along with Margaret Atwood, of a Dan David
prize, and 2011 he was awarded the Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis festival in Montreal.
In 2018 the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor, was conferred on Amitav
Ghosh. He was the first English-language writer to receive the award. In 2019 Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade.
In 2024, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize by the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation. Headshot
credit: Mathieu Genon.
Register to attend the Keynote
This event will be captioned. If you require additional accommodations, please contact Disability and Accessibility Services at das@loyola.edu.
Faculty Teaching Seminar
Faculty members are invited to attend a Humanities Symposium Teaching seminar on Wednesday February 5 from 12:00 to 1:00 PM in College Center Conference Room 105. This seminar will provide information about the Humanities Student-Faculty Colloquia and will also offer suggestions and resources for teaching this year's text.
Faculty from three different departments will share ideas about how to incorporate the text into your spring courses and to prepare your students to participate in the colloquia.
Further details to follow.
Student-Faculty Colloquia
Wednesday, March 12 and Thursday, March 13, 2025
McManus Theatre
Faculty from all disciplines and their students attend colloquium sessions together during their regularly scheduled class times.
Please register on the Bridge to let us know when you and your students will be participating on Wednesday, March 12 and/or Thursday, March 13. Use the quantity box in each time slot to tell us how many students you will be bringing during that time.
Colloquia Registration
Faculty members may select multiple time slots if participating with more than one
class. Faculty whose classes fall outside the colloquia hours (Wednesday, March 12
from 8-5 and Thursday, March 13 from 8-4:20) may ask students to attend individually
as long as the faculty member also attends one session.
For more information about the 2025 Humanities Symposium events, please email Billy Friebele, associate professor of Visual and Performing Arts, at wefriebele@loyola.edu.
Related events:
Future: Evergreener
From Destruction to Abundance
Art Exhibition on Climate Change
January 13 - February 14
Julio Fine Arts Gallery
Andrew White Student Center
Opening Reception on Thursday, January 16 from 6:00 - 8:00 PM in the Julio Fine Arts Gallery
Artist Panel Discussion on February 5 at 6:30 PM in McManus Theater
Future: Evergreener features art by local artists Andrea Sherrill Evans, Maggie Gourlay, Eileen Wold,
and Jowita Wyszomirska, and is curated and organized by Loyola’s Fall 2024 Museum
Studies Class taught by Kerry Boeye.
O Rio Negro São As Pessoas -
Environmental Film Screening & Discussion with Filmmakers
Monday, February 3
Loyola Notre Dame Library Auditorium
6:00 PM
followed by a talkback with some of the film's creators
The Anavilhanas National Park, in the Rio Negro Amazon, is the environment for presenting characters living in the tenuous orbit between the city Manaus and riverside communities on the banks of this historic river. The film explores the contemporary meaning of being at and growing up by the banks of a river with the power of Rio Negro, submerged in a dense forest and surrounded by global elements of today; the need to leave, the forgotten desire to return, the choice to stay, the immensity and the time of the river, form an intuitive and imaginary narrative set to suggest deeply local stories that serve the reflection on human life.
Register to attend.
Daniel Deudney - Modern Masters Reading Series
Thursday February 13
McGuire Hall
Andrew White Student Center
6:30 PM
Daniel H. Deudney teaches political science, international relations and political theory at Johns Hopkins University. He holds a BA in political science and philosophy from Yale University, a MPA in science, technology, and public policy from George Washington University, and a PhD in political science from Princeton University. His areas of research are general international relations theory, international political theory and republicanism, and contemporary global issues (nuclear, outer space, environment, and energy). His publications include Renewable Energy (Norton, 1983), co-author; and Contested Grounds: Conflict and Security in the New Global Environmental Politics (SUNY, 1998), co-editor.
Toxic Tour of Curtis Bay and Community-Led and Controlled Development
Friday, February 21
9:00 AM - 3:00 PM
(Bus transportation will be provided)
Students will have an opportunity to see, to hear, to witness the environmental violence of 77+ stationary toxic facilities in Curtis Bay. Due to the cumulative impact of stationary toxic facilities, this community has some of the highest cases of respiratory illnesses in the entire country.
We will go back in time to 2012 when youth from the community heard about a plan to build the nation's largest trash to energy incinerator a mile from their high school. This youth group has grown from stopping one polluting industry to now thinking about longer term community-led and controlled development.
9:00 am - Start at the Curtis Bay Recreation Center - 1630 Filbert Street, Baltimore
MD
10:00 am - Walk to where we can see the CSX terminal and coal piled up
11:00 am - Fairfield and Wagner's Point where Shashawnda Campbell (SBCLT organizer)
will talk through early days of free your voice and the Incinerator struggle
12:30 pm - Lunch @ SBCLT office 145 W. Ostend Street
1:30 pm - Hear about the Land Trust homes and visit the first passive home
registration details to follow
Roundtable on Environmental Justice with Nicole Fabricant
Monday, February 24
Humanities Café (main floor of the Humanities Building)
6:00-7:00 PM
Monday following the toxic tour, Loyola students will have an opportunity to plug into roundtable discussions about the ongoing work in South Baltimore. One table will focus on legislation and policy, another will focus on alternative housing and the third table will focus on environmental justice and youth education. There will be popular education and activities to get them thinking about their own interests and talents and how this can feed into the grassroots organizing work.
Nicole Fabricant is Professor of Anthropology at Towson University in Maryland. She
teaches courses on resource extraction, environmental justice, and the climate crisis.
Her most recent book, Fighting to Breathe Race, Toxicity and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore (University of California Press 2022) looks at the cumulative impacts of industrial
stationary toxic facilities in South Baltimore, Maryland. The book follows a dynamic
and creative group of high school students who decided to fight back against the race-
and class-based health disparities and inequality of industrial expansion.
Can't Stop Change - Queer Climate Stories from the Florida Frontlines
Environmental Film Screening and Discussion
Monday, April 9
Loyola Notre Dame Library Auditorium
6:00 PM
As Florida's violent legislation dominates headlines, LGBTQ2S+ communities are also on the frontlines of accelerating climate change. Can't Stop Change: Queer Climate Stories from the Florida Frontlines weaves interviews with 14 LGBTQ2S+ artists, organizers, and educators across Florida (and the new Florida diaspora) into an intersectional climate justice narrative.
Amidst so much unknown, Can't Stop Change shares an emergent hope: Moments of disaster create opportunities for immense transformation, where what once seemed impossible becomes possible. As we look towards the next hurricane season and next legislative cycle, how can we work with the changes to come to shape the futures we want?
Register to attend.
Event Information
Theme: Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor
Keynote Address:
Thursday, March 13, 2025
McGuire Hall
6:30 p.m.
Text: The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh
Questions? Please contact Billy Friebele, Associate professor, Visual and Performing Arts
wefriebele@loyola.edu