This meeting will focus on a discussion of an article by Naomi Klein concerning Puerto Rico that served as the early draft of her most recent book The Battle for Paradise.

Stephanie Rothenberg will also present her current project “Trading Systems: Bio-Economic Fairy Tales in the Anthropocene.” This project explores the notion of the anthropocene as it relates to the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and what it might look like if non-human forces could be put in the driver’s seat during reconstruction. What happens when models of non-human ecological systems are used to identify and rethink the dysfunctional systems, fairy tales, that are currently troubling our social welfare, economy, and governance?

In addition to the primary reading:
Naomi Klein, The Intercept, March 20, 2018

We encourage people to read:
Walter Mignolo’s Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing
On (De)Coloniality, Border Thinking, and Epistemic Disobedience (2011)
and Caroline Picard’s interview with Zoe Todd, “The Future is Elastic (But It Depends)” (August 2016)