Past Events

Thinking with Oil and the Graphic Novel: Climate & Colonialism Reading Group

Workshop

  • 25 June 2024
  • 3:00 – 4:00 pm
  • Online

Event hosted in collaboration with Anisha Palat (University of Edinburgh).

In this session, we will focus on oil using Kate Beaton’s graphic novel Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, in which the author renders her own experiences of oil sands in Canada as a visual memoir. This session will also focus on the effectiveness of the graphic novel as a medium to tell a tale about oil and the environment, and will draw from the novel’s themes of industry and labour to discuss environmental destruction and degradation.

To Read

Further reading:

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is available at Paul Mellon Centre library. Some extracts from the graphic novel are available on Google Books. If you have any questions, or have difficulty in accessing the texts, please write to the organiser: [email protected]

This Climate & Colonialism Reading Group aims to provide a space for discussion and reflection about the role of the arts and visual cultures in discourses around climate and colonialism. It hopes to foster a dialogue that begins to question systems of oppression that have contributed to the colonial project and its relationships to ecology. The selection of texts for the Reading Group will foreground ecofeminist, Black, Brown and Indigenous scholarship that focuses on the intersections between the environment, extraction and colonial systems and also considers the histories of decolonisation and speculative imaginaries of human and more-than-human ecologies. The Reading Group will meet once every two months. It is open to everyone.

This event will be online only.

For further details, and to hear about future Reading Group events, please sign up to the mailing list here.