Life in the Anthropocene

Dr. Kieko Matteson

Kieko Matteson is an Associate Professor of environmental and French history at the University of Hawai’i. Her work explores the intersection between public policy, community identity, and individual agency, focusing on forest management and common pool resource governance in early modern and modern Europe. Following on the heels of her first book, “Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669-1848” (Cambridge University Press, 2015), her current research investigates a brutal double murder in 1813 in the context of environmental violence past and present. In her course offerings on U.S. and world environmental history at UH, Matteson works with her students to understand the roots of our current global climate crisis and find optimism for the future.

Dr. Justin Walguarnery

Justin Walguarnery studies how humans and other animals acquire, process, and respond to information in a rapidly changing world. He has taught fifteen courses at the University of Hawai’i on subjects including statistical analysis, animal behavior, ecology, conservation, origin of species, and the origin and future of life. He has authored and edited online content for five textbooks on biology, and the digital educational tools that he’s developed are currently used at over 500 colleges and universities. Contact: justinww@hawaii.edu

Dr. Jaimey Hamilton Faris

Jaimey Hamilton Faris is Associate Professor of Art History and Critical Theory at the University of Hawai’i. She writes about contemporary art, global economies, and global ecologies. For the past decade, she has been focused on how art brings visibility to global trade structures, culminating in her book Uncommon Goods (Intellect 2103) and in articles for Art Journal, October, Art Margins and more. Recently, she has turned her attention the relationship between global economic "flows" and the earth's own ecological cycles. She has been working on a new project, called Liquid Archives, an eco-critical exploration of the ocean as a 3.8 billion-year old medium now keeping track of our global economy – accumulating, absorbing, suspending, and circulating its energies, waste, and heat. 

Dr. John Rieder 

John Rieder is Professor of English and currently Chair of the English Department at UHM. He has published extensively on science fiction, including the books Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Wesleyan UP, 2008) and Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (Wesleyan UP, 2017). He is a co-editor of the science fiction studies journal Extrapolation.

Transcript of Introduction by Dr Britton Elliott Brooks:

Aloha kākou and good evening.

My name is Dr. Britton Brooks, and I am a Lecturer in Medieval British Literature here at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. I am also the founder and director of Converging Epistemologies.

As this is our inaugural event, I would like to begin with telling you a bit more about what our group is all about. An epistemology, loosely defined, is a way of knowing, including knowing a concept and knowing how something is done. While this is a rich field of philosophical inquiry, we take the term here at its broadest meaning. For example, let’s begin with what appears a simple question:

What is a mountain? A gathering of stone distinct from the gathering next to it in height, shape, and constituent geology? Is it a place to test oneself? A place to climb, hike, summit. Do we know it by our feet, its sharpness, softness, its heat, its cold pressing upon us, even as we look in awe and take pictures of the sun setting over its shoulders?

Is it a foundation upon which we build our homes and schools? A resource for our artifice? I grew up in Aiea Heights on the slopes of the Koʻolau, so going up meant going home. Is it an ecosystem with its own inhabitants, birds, pigs, mosquitoes? What about our mountains? This picture is Mauna Kea, a place sacred to many. It is a place of identity. Its story is a convergence of geology, mythology, culture, language, and history. It is also at the forefront of our exploration of the universe. Perhaps it is all of these.

Mountains are places rich in converging ways of knowing. Magma, Granite, Limestone, converging with Pele, Kami, our ancestors, all mixed with our lived experience. We know them for their height, use them as metaphors for strength and stability, our very bones formed from the minerals that flow down their sides.

The world, this example suggests, is complex, layered, and interdependent. We are entwined biological systems with a mind, a will, shaped by culture, language, education, location, and experience.

Converging Epistemologies recognizes this complexity, and seeks to address the issues of our contemporary world by bringing together our different ways of knowing. We are scholars, we approach questions in a variety of ways with a variety of tools. Yet there are ways of knowing beyond that of the University, and when brought together, all these perspectives can generate new answers to the difficulties we all face.

Together, with respect, and a little bit of hope, we can know the world better.