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Climate Justice Series | Fly Me to the Moon

Wed, September 28th, 2022
4:00 pm
- 5:30 pm

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Zoom Registration Details for Seminars
September 28 | 4:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) | Zoom
Register in advance for this meeting
https://williams.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIkcuutqz0tHNInXrporm0FEvOvcXNS5dow
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The climate crisis is on everybody’s minds especially as unbearable heatwaves, intense droughts, frightening wildfires and extreme flooding affect the world over. As extreme weather worsens around the world, as seen over this last summer in diverse places, such as China, Somalia, Pakistan, India, Europe, several parts of the US, and East Asia, it is important that we take stock and provide important opportunities and for students to learn about and take an active role in addressing the climate crisis.

In the US, for 2022 so far, there have been 9 weather-related or climate-induced disaster events exceeding $1 billion in losses each. Water shortages and problems in Western United States, in Texas and in cities like Jackson, Mississippi, and Flint, Michigan have for all intents and purposes some link to a changing climate and broader environmental justice issues, that tend to disproportionately affect marginalized and impoverished Black, Brown and Indigenous neighborhoods and communities.

Starting this fall, Africana Studies will host a Climate Justice Series comprising student-centered seminars, discussions, film screenings, and other activities with scholars, activists, practitioners, artists and performers aimed at supporting collaborative learning and constructive dialogue towards promoting action-oriented ideas, projects and deeper analysis related to the climate crisis and its differentiated impacts on especially disenfranchised and marginalized human communities, non-human beings and the socio ecological system.

Fly Me to the Moon

A feature documentary by Jamaican independent filmmaker Esther Figueroa, that takes us on a journey into the unexpected ways we are all connected on Planet Earth, by following aluminum—the metal of modernity—around the world and into space.

We travel for over one hundred years, visiting places as far flung as the Moon, Jamaica, India, Suriname, Canada, Cuba, Japan, Hungary, Iceland, Australia, Vietnam, and the United States of America, encountering along the way human triumphs, technological innovations, multiple wars, societal upheavals, and environmental devastation. And in the urgent here and now of the climate crisis, the film challenges us to think about the consequences of our consumption, to reimagine the ways in which we live, and to change our material culture and political economy that is destroying the planet we all depend on.

Esther Figueroa, Ph.D, is a Jamaican independent filmmaker, writer, and environmental activist with more than thirty-five years of media productions including television programming, documentaries, educational videos, multimedia and feature film. Her activist filmmaking gives voice to those outside of mainstream media and focuses on the perpetuation of local and indigenous knowledge and cultures, the natural environment, social injustice, and community empowerment. Figueroa’s films are screened and televised all over the world and taught at numerous universities.

(film access will be provided for a 48-hour window from September 26-28)

Sponsored by the Africana Studies Department and the Class of 1963 Sustainability Award

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