Human-Environment Relations at UDelaware
“The Chiapas struggle of warfare spanning the past 500 years can be traced back to colonization, conquest, and the systematic erasure, invisibilization, and genocide of Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas.“
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chatted with Dr. Julie Klinger.
Have a listen as Dr. Klinger talks about “rare earths — a family of 17 elements that are essential to the function of modern industry and are indispensable in everyday technology. Julie debunks many of the myths surrounding China and rare earths, and lays out her ideas about why, despite the relative ubiquity of mineable rare earth deposits, China has dominated production of these vitally important minerals for decades. ”
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the stories landscapes tell about who has been there, how the land has changed, who or what drove those changes. As a geoscientist, I am inclined to lean on maps and satellite imagery to capture landscape evolution. Studies of place and people (uhm, geography?) have explored the different ways that landscapes have shaped our experiences, we develop emotional ties with some spaces more than others- a theory called place-attachment. However, there is little work that explores how places might remember us. If places had the same intricate emotional capacity as us and bear witness to our lived experiences and those of our predecessors, how would they remember us?
Interdisciplinary artists (Juan deGado- Altered Landscapes (2016) ) explore these questions beautifully- capturing altered landscapes in photographs and mixed media, building fragmented installations to explore displacement, dislocation, and trauma. Photography allows for a static archive of a place and captures the state of the place in-situ. Photos can trigger memories of familiar places as well as emotions of unfamiliar but stirring landscapes. Ruins, memorial sites, and monuments serve as memory aids much like photos do- places haunted by past catastrophic events continue to actively affect emotional responses from patrons and visitors despite the absence of personal memories to those locations.
Places carry biographies, stitched across generations that even in the absence of human occupation can be emotionally perceived. We build monuments and memorials to focus, archive and prolong social memory of historical events to sites. A bench, name plaque, or a white man on a horse serve to materialize memory and reinfuse meaning and history into designed spaces and objects. We build monuments to remember, to preserve, maybe more so to empower artifacts that can allow us to continue to retrieve specific social memories. Memorialization expedites the visceral response one might have to an unbuilt but charged landscape through tactile and visual stimuli. Monuments concentrate place-based meaning and memories; they serve as gateways to the past. But looking is not seeing. Visual triggers might even diminish, simplify, and homogenize the complex stories contained in landscapes. Spectatorship can also diminish historical complexity and reinforce passivity.
The built environment especially monuments and memorials evoke memories and histories of conquers, joys and traumas. It’s challenging to think of ways of tapping into social and ecological memories without the aids of statues, monuments and memorials despite the obvious limitations-memorialization and remembering through material culture often centers a single story and it takes power from the land and infuses it into a structure (the Washington monument becomes both the piece of land the monument lies on and the monument itself). Memorialization’s are modern-day shrines.
Today historical monuments are becoming the focus of controversy (critic). In landscapes that belong to all of us, whose histories are centered and whose remain in the shadows or become wholly erased? Who gets to be remembered? Should we remove, add to or recontextualize these artifacts? There is a lack of dialogue around the significance of place and land in collective historical memory. How can memorials be better designed to engage us with the land and all the characters in the story-the conqueror, the native populations, and the ecosystems and natural resources usurped, traded, and pillaged? How do we especially account for the active participation of unbuilt landscapes in social interactions and their archives of past events? Land and territory acknowledgement (which has been a part of many indigenous cultures for years) is a good example of how engaging the unbuilt environment might look like. Acknowledging the histories and past occupants of the land we stand on reduces the erasure of the stories that do not make it to plaques and monuments and shifts our focus to the unbuilt environment.
Especially at the later life stage, the home is a symbol of ownership, a symbol of self-sufficiency, and pride. As a financial product, Reverse Mortgage threatens the stability and dignity of the people and their families. Because of misunderstanding about how this product works and low accessibility to the prime lending market, African-Americans and other minority groups are the most vulnerable groups.
It is certainly easy – and honestly exhausting – to talk about disruptions and encounters with grief today. The disruptions imposed by the continued growth of a largely unchecked and mismanaged pandemic in the United States allows for anxiety, grief, depression, and uncertainty to creep into our everyday lives. The impacts of life with covid-19 on mental health are acutely felt across the general population. Here, I want to briefly speak to graduate student experiences brought forth by the pandemic. Within academia travel restrictions, campus shutdowns, and budgetary shortfalls are fueling rising rates of poor mental health among graduate students (a population which already experiences higher rates of mental health difficulties when compared to the average U.S. citizen).
Speaking to my own experience, I have deeply felt the disruptions of the pandemic in my own body, layering onto already existing mental health struggles. I felt the growing anxious energy fueled by the daily uncertainty of “what comes next?” I grieved the complete dissolution of my planned dissertation research – truly grieved – feeling the fatigue and emptiness as a pit and a weight tying me down. As I sat in uncertainty, grasping for new ideas for my research, the usual whispers of imposter syndrome (a familiar experience to many graduate students) grew into a loud chorus that filled my head.
These are not my experiences alone. They are felt and experienced (albeit, differently) by a great number of graduate students. Maybe your field season had to either be cut short or skipped altogether. Maybe the isolation of the lockdown has left you distracted, unmotivated, and distressed. Possibly, you are able to enter (or, are told you have to enter) your lab but feel growing anxiety over your own safety. Or, as I have experienced, you have had to jettison or drastically reduce your thesis or dissertation project. The effects of covid-19 on the research activities of graduate students has sown wholesale uncertainty. Additionally, according at a recent study the number of graduate students experiencing prolonged major depressive periods is twice as high in 2020 as it was in 2019, with 1.5 times higher reporting of generalized anxiety over the same time period. All of these possibilities (and many more) are stacked on top of fears of losing a loved one, financial instability, the loneliness of isolation, and the dread of a collapsing job market, compounding the pandemic induced anxiety and depression felt by graduate students (as well as faculty, staff, and undergraduates).
I am excited to see that there are some efforts, led by institutions and/or graduate students themselves, towards tackling the rise of mental distress among graduate populations but acknowledge (given the data on rising mental distress) that we have not yet done enough. We need academic administrators to center mental health as part of their recovery plans. When this isn’t done, faculty, students, and staff need to continue to pressure their institutions to become more caring spaces and create networks of support for all members of the academic community.
Here I can offer no advice on how to navigate the seemingly continuous assaults on mental health during this pandemic. I hope, as well, that this does not come across as an anguished scream into the void. In my experience I have had to learn how to give myself what I need. To allow myself to grieve and accept the change in my research; to be better about reaching out and accepting help; and to simply be kind to myself (a struggle, to be sure). Uncertainty and generalized anxiety still creep into the four walls I am isolating in, there is no quick and easy solution to dealing with poor mental health. I just wanted to say to take care of yourself, be kind to yourself, know that you alone aren’t struggling.