Climate | Change 2025-26

John Levi Barnard, Comparative & World Literature and English
Jamie L. Jones, English (on leave 2025-26)
 

Climate | Change is a multi-year initiative that examines creative interventions in, interpretations of, and solutions to the climate crisis in which all of academic work is currently embedded. It also pushes us to re-think how the “climate” of our institution currently facilitates and limits those interventions and solutions. The initiative envisions new possibilities and fosters new relationships, bringing scholars, researchers, artists, and knowledge-makers together at the Center for Advanced Study for interdisciplinary conversations and action.

At the Climate | Change initiative, we are committed to environmental justice. In our conversations about climate change, we will work to name and address the disproportionate unjust experience of environmental harm born by certain communities. We are, in particular, committed to addressing the legacies of settler colonialism and systemic racism. As researchers in land-grant institution, we are interested in particular in acknowledging Indigenous people and centering Indigenous thought in our conversations.

Fall 2023-Spring 2025 events

Note about the artwork

The paired images by an artist colleague here at the University of Illinois, Bloom and Remediator, speak to some of the concerns and commitments of the CAS Climate | Change Initiative: the violence of climate change, the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman systems, and resilience and the practical hope needed in the face of crisis. Jellyfish “blooms” are one of the consequences of warming oceans: the increase in jellyfish populations is a concrete sign of the way climate change is changing the ocean. And at the same time, the resilience of jellyfish to warming waters illustrates a form of climate resilience. Mushrooms—Lingscheidt’s Remediators—are living organisms used to remediate polluted soil by breaking down plastics, heavy metals, and chemical contamination. Mushrooms, too, signal climate violence and at the same time, model climate resilience. The mushroom’s hemispheric caps echo the jellyfish’s form, suggesting the interconnection of species across land and sea.