University of Minnesota Press

Craig Robertson’s THE FILING CABINET explores how this now-neglected artifact profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used. Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet continues to shape how we interact with information and data in the digital age. In this episode, Robertson, who is associate professor of media studies at Northeastern University in Boston (also author of THE PASSPORT IN AMERICA), is joined by Shannon Mattern, professor of anthropology at The New School in New York City, and Lisa Gitelman, professor of English and media studies at New York University. This conversation was recorded in May 2021. About the book: z.umn.edu/thefilingcabinet

Jamie Lorimer’s THE PROBIOTIC PLANET calls for a rethinking of artificial barriers between science and policy and a sweeping overview of diverse probiotic approaches. Bruce Clarke’s GAIAN SYSTEMS is a pioneering exploration of the complex evolution of Gaia’s many variants. In a conversation that ranges from Lynn Margulis to science fiction, neocybernetics to COVID-19, Lorimer and Clarke ultimately seek insight into solving an environmental crisis of humanity’s own making. This conversation was recorded in November 2020. BOOKS: The Probiotic Planet: z.umn.edu/theprobioticplanet Gaian Systems: z.umn.edu/gaiansystems REFERENCES: Helminth, a species of parasitic worm Heather Paxson on raw milk cheese Bruno Latour Isabelle Stengers Donna Haraway James Lovelock Lynn Margulis Lyndisfarne Conferences Stewart Brand O’Neill cylinder William Gibson’s Neuromancer Stanisław Lem Frank Herbert’s Dune

CAPTURE is a book that reveals how the drive to contain and record disappearing animals was a central feature and organizing pursuit of the nineteenth-century US cultural canon. In a conversation that ranges from references to Muybridge and Audubon, Poe and Hawthorne, Whitman and Thoreau, environmental humanities and biopolitics, presentation and representation, capture and captivity, (with a cameo from Sylvester Graham of the Graham cracker), Antoine Traisnel (author of CAPTURE) joins Michelle Neely (author of AGAINST SUSTAINABILITY) in a lively and rigorous discussion. Traisnel is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Michigan. Neely is associate professor of English at Connecticut College. This conversation was recorded in March 2021. BOOKS DISCUSSED: Capture: http://z.umn.edu/capturebook Against Sustainability: https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823288205/against-sustainability/ REFERENCES: Eadweard Muybridge James Fenimore Cooper Edgar Allan Poe Nathaniel Hawthorne Gerald Vizenor Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am Nicole Shukin Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows John James Audubon Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project Herman Melville, Moby Dick Jeremy Bentham Michel Foucault and biopolitics Walt Whitman Lucille Clifton Henry David Thoreau Emily Dickinson Sylvester Graham (of the Graham cracker) Seed vault / Doomsday Vault

Amid xenophobic challenges to America’s core value of welcoming the tired and the poor, Irina Aristarkhova calls for new forms of hospitality in her engagement with the works of eight international artists. In ARRESTED WELCOME, the first monograph on hospitality in contemporary art, she employs a feminist perspective and asks who, how, and what determines who is worthy of welcome. With a focus on lessons that contemporary artists teach about the potential of hospitality, Aristarkhova looks at Linda Hattendorf’s documentary The Cats of Mirikitani; the Serbian-born installation and performance artist Ana Prvački’s project The Greeting Committee Reports . . . ; American artist Faith Wilding’s performance Waiting; Taiwanese American artist Lee Mingwei’s aesthetics of hospitality; American bioartist Kathy High’s project Embracing Animal; Mithu Sen’s artworks that explore questions of radical hospitality and crossing borders; Pippa Bacca and Silvia Moro’s art project Brides on Tour; and Ken Aptekar’s exhibition Neighbours in Lübeck, Germany. Aristarkhova is professor at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is author of Arrested Welcome: Hospitality in Contemporary Art and Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture. She is joined today by Jorge Lucero, an artist born, raised and educated in Chicago. He is chair and associate professor of art education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Lucero's books include Mere and Easy: Collage as a Critical Practice in Pedagogy, Teacher as Artist-in-Residence: The Most Radical Form of Expression to Ever Exist, and the forthcoming What Happens at the Intersection of Conceptual Art and Teaching?. Lucero is coeditor of the international journal Visual Arts Research and sits on the editorial boards for the Journal of Social Theory and Art Education, the Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, and the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. This conversation was recorded in February 2021. More about ARRESTED WELCOME: z.umn.edu/arrestedwelcome Irina Aristarkhova: https://stamps.umich.edu/people/detail/irina_aristarkhova Jorge Lucero: www.jorgelucero.com An open-access edition of ARRESTED WELCOME is available at https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/arrested-welcome.

“I may not be able to find my family but it always made me feel a step closer to help others.” OUTSIDERS WITHIN is a landmark publication that explores transracial adoption and the heavy emotional and cultural toll on those who directly experience it. The volume has many contributors who explore transracial adoption through essays, fiction, poetry, and art. OUTSIDERS WITHIN is coedited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin. This episode features Trenka in conversation with Ami Nafzger. Jane Jeong Trenka was adopted from South Korea to Minnesota. She holds a master of public administration from Seoul National University and was instrumental in revising Korea’s adoption law in 2011. She is author of THE LANGUAGE OF BLOOD and FUGITIVE VISIONS and coauthor of CHILD-SELLING COUNTRY (in Korean) with Kihye Jeon Hong and Kyung-eun Lee. She lives in Korea. Ami Inja Nafzger (aka Jin Inja) was adopted from Cheonju, South Korea, at the age of four and grew up in Wisconsin. She attended Augsburg College in Minnesota, graduating in social work, sociology, and Native American Indian studies. She founded Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (GOA’L) in 1997. Nafzger is founder, president, and CEO of Adoptee Hub and works for the Department of Human Services (DHS) State of Minnesota as a Planning Director in the Business Integration Division for Children and Family Services. LINKS: Outsiders Within: z.umn.edu/outsiderswithin Adoptee Hub: https://www.adopteehub.org/ G.O.A’.L.: Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link: https://goal.or.kr/

The urgency of climate change means it is not sufficient for environmental scholarship to describe our complex relationship to the natural world. It must also compel a response. TIMESCALES: THINKING ACROSS ECOLOGICAL TEMPORALITIES gathers scholars from different fields, placing traditional academic essays alongside experimental sections, to promote innovation and collaboration. This episode asks: Why art? Why art … at all? With climate change and environmental catastrophe looming large, what purpose does art serve in pressing conversations about environmental futures? Three TIMESCALES contributors are here to answer that question: -Patricia Eunji Kim, assistant professor/faculty fellow at the Gallatin School of Individualized Studies and a provost’s postdoctoral fellow at New York University. She serves as an assistant curator at Monument Lab, a public art and history studio. Kim researches and teaches Greco-Roman art and archaeology, with a focus on issues of gender, cultural identity, and empire. Her in-progress monograph examines the art and archaeology of royal women from the Hellenistic world (4th–1st century BCE). -Kate Farquhar is a Philadelphia-based landscape designer at Olin and has worked at the intersection of ecology, infrastructure, and art for fifteen years. Her TIMESCALES chapter focuses on WetLand, an experimental floating lab created from a 45-foot-long salvaged houseboat in 2014 by artist Mary Mattingly. From 2015 to 2016, Farquhar served as program coordinator for events that accompanied its residency with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) on the Lower Schuylkill River. -Dr. Marcia Ferguson, a professional actor, director, and educator, has worked as a theatre artist in Philadelphia regional theatre and arts organizations including the Wilma Theatre, Painted Bride Art Center, Act II Playhouse, Irish Heritage, Paper Dolls, the Mediums, Juniper productions, the Daedalus String Quartet, and the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She has collaborated on seven original productions for Edinburgh and Philadelphia Fringe festivals, and has done theatre and film work in Los Angeles, New York, Rome, and Tokyo. She is senior lecturer in theatre arts at the University of Pennsylvania and has published two books and several articles on theatre. Her TIMESCALES chapter focuses on Pig Iron’s work in progress “A Period of Animate Existence,” the subject of a discussion Ferguson moderated at the 2016 PPEH conference. Director Dan Rothenberg, composer Troy Herion, and set designer Mimi Lien were the 2016-17 artists in residence at PPEH. This conversation was recorded in November 2020. This is the third and final podcast episode in a series that has featured the book’s three coeditors: Kim; Bethany Wiggin, director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities; and Carolyn Fornoff, assistant professor of Latin American culture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. REFERENCES: Timescales: z.umn.edu/timescales WetLand: https://ppeh.sas.upenn.edu/experiments/wetland A Period of Animate Existence: https://www.pigiron.org/productions/period-animate-existence MORE TIMESCALES PODCAST EPISODES: -Ep. 14: Time and the interplay between human history and planetary history. With Carolyn Fornoff, Jen Telesca, Wai Chee Dimock, and Charles Tung: https://soundcloud.com/user-760891605/episode-14 -Ep. 12: Scientists and humanists talk timescales and climate change. With Bethany Wiggin, Frankie Pavia, Jason Bell, and Jane Dmochowski: https://soundcloud.com/user-760891605/episode-12

Scammer’s Yard is an ethnography that focuses on the stories of three young Black Jamaicans who strive to make a living in Montego Bay, where call centers and tourism are the two main industries in the struggling economy. Author Jovan Scott Lewis raises unsettling questions about the fairness of a world economy that relegates Caribbean populations to durative sufferation. This groundbreaking book asks whether true reparation for the legacy of colonialism is to be found only through radical—even criminal—means. Lewis, an assistant professor of geography and African American Studies at UC Berkeley, is joined here by Peter James Hudson, associate professor of African American Studies and History at UCLA. This conversation was recorded in November 2020. More about the book: z.umn.edu/scammersyard REFERENCES: Caricom Reparations Commission Walter Rodney Sylvia Wynter Stuart Hall C. L. R. James George Padmore Frantz Fanon Lloyd Best Faye Harrison Beverley Mullings Barry Chevannes Walter Rodney

If you’ve ever wondered what to do with your summer and considered (1) making history, (2) spending the whole thing on a wild 2,000-mile canoe trip, and (3) putting your relationship with your best friend to the ultimate test, then you know exactly what author Natalie Warren has experienced. In the summer after graduating college, Natalie and Ann Raiho set off on the banks of the Minnesota River with the ultimate goal of reaching the Arctic waters of Canada’s Hudson Bay in 90 days or less. Natalie writes all about their journey in her book HUDSON BAY BOUND, and is here today to chat with another history-making explorer, Ann Bancroft, who, along with Liv Arnesen, were the first two women to cross Antarctica. This conversation was recorded in October 2020. More on Hudson Bay Bound: Two Women, One Dog, Two Thousand Miles to the Arctic: z.umn.edu/hudsonbaybound. More on Ann Bancroft's historic journey across Antarctica: z.umn.edu/nohorizon

TIMESCALES is a book that explores how time has seemed to shift in the Anthropocene and examines the human inability to see and to witness time as an element of environmental catastrophe. The volume brings together humanities scholars, scientists, and artists to develop new ways of thinking about the world with its human and nonhuman entanglements and diverse systems of knowledge. Carolyn Fornoff is assistant professor of Latin American culture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is co-editor, along with Bethany Wiggin and Patricia Kim, of Timescales. Fornoff is joined here by three volume contributors: Jen Telesca, assistant professor of environmental justice in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute; Wai Chee Dimock, editor of PMLA, who teaches at Yale University; and Charles Tung, professor of English at Seattle University. This conversation was recorded in December 2020.REFERENCES:-Timescales: Thinking across Ecological Temporalities. z.umn.edu/timescales-Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna (Jen Telesca)-Modernism and Time Machines (Charles Tung)-Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival (Wai Chee Dimock)-’Salmon’ by Jack Scoltock: https://www.firstpeople.us/native-american-poems/salmon.html-Black ‘47: Native American Poetry (Jack Scoltock)-”Irish support for Native American Covid-19 relief highlights historic bond”: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/09/irish-native-american-coronavirus-historic-bond-Salmon in the Trees (Amy Gulick)-Beyond Settler Time (Mark Rifkin)-“How the Covid-19 pandemic has been curtailed in Cherokee Nation”: https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/17/how-covid19-has-been-curtailed-in-cherokee-nation/-”The Amazon Is on Fire—Indigenous Rights Can Help Put It Out,” by Naomi Klein: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/08/26/amazon-fire-indigenous-rights-can-help-put-it-out-“Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene” by Kyle Whyte. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2514848618777621-The Human Planet (Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis)MORE TIMESCALES PODCAST EPISODES:-Ep. 17: Why art? On performance, theater, deep time, and the environment. With Patricia Eunji Kim, Kate Farquhar, and Marcia Ferguson: https://soundcloud.com/user-760891605/episode-17-Ep. 12: Scientists and humanists talk timescales and climate change. With Bethany Wiggin, Frankie Pavia, Jason Bell, and Jane Dmochowski: https://soundcloud.com/user-760891605/episode-12

“Historically, women have had to frame their own intellectual advancement in alternative terms.” When writer Edith Wharton died in 1937, her library of more than five thousand volumes was divided and subsequently sold. Decades later, it was reassembled and returned to The Mount, her historic Massachusetts estate. WHAT A LIBRARY MEANS TO A WOMAN is a book by Sheila Liming that examines personal libraries as technologies of self-creation in modern America. For Wharton, a library meant a home, a school, a sense of independence, a place of solitude but not loneliness, and a place where she set rules for herself as a writer and as a reader. Liming is joined here by Nynke Dorhout and Anne Schuyler of The Mount in Lenox, MA, and by Wharton scholar Donna Campbell. This conversation was recorded in December 2020. For more information: z.umn.edu/whatalibrarymeans edithwhartonslibrary.org edithwharton.org whartoncompleteworks.org