(At)tension was the inaugural symposium of the newly formed Environment, Culture, and Society Research Cluster at Northwestern University, for which I acted as chair. With an organizing committee of 5 colleagues, we invited scholars, activists, makers, and artists from across the Midwest and greater US to consider the following:

“As the Environmental Humanities continues its solidification as a field of study and specialization, the discipline and its methodologies are at risk of reifying the violences that occur when experimental and emerging methods are codified within pre-existing institutional logics. How can the Environmental Humanities keep its nimbleness, its indeterminacy, its commitment to epistemological justice, in order to resist the pitfalls of standardization? How might scholars, artists, and practitioners escape their enfolding into an opaque epistemological enclosure and the
limitations that follow suit? We suggest that it is precisely through ecological, cultural, and political attunement to forms of stasis and change, climatic and atmospheric flux, as well as epistemic and methodological discontents that we may encounter new modalities of praxis and
thought.

How do flux and state-change engage our attention and how does that attention influence the processes of flux and state-change?
How could attunement to states of transition, tension, and suspension reorient existing modalities of environmental thought and critique?
What forms of attention, reading, or engagement are better attuned to deciphering transitions of material, thought, and practice?
What experiments in affective, attentive modes can prepare us for increased and overlapping forms of indeterminacy?”

Our website, designed by Sasha Artamonova, can be found here. My opening remarks for the symposium can be found here. Contributions from the symposium compose the first issue of the cluster’s digital publication Lime, launching Spring 2025.