Join award-winning journalist Meera Subramanian in an exploration of the edge zone between the natural and unnatural world we inhabit. She'll read and discuss a new piece forthcoming in Orion magazine about the nature of plastics and how their expansive presence is altering systems large and small: biological, ecological, geological. As plastics degrade, so do the barriers that once seemed so defined and distinct, between the inert and the organic, between the outside of a body and its interior, between science and art, between present and future. Even between what is living and what is not.
Meera Subramanian is an award-winning journalist who has explored the disappearance of India’s vultures, questioned the “Good Anthropocene,” and investigated perceptions of climate change among conservative Americans. She is a contributing editor of Orion, and former MIT Knight Science Journalism fellow and Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University. Her narrative nonfiction book A River Runs Again: India's Natural World in Crisis, was a 2016 Orion Book Award finalist. You can find her at www.meerasub.org.
This event is taking place in the context of SCCT 510, a course on "Monstrous Ecologies" co-taught by Chris Cokinos (English) and Joela Jacobs (German Studies) for the Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory GIDP.
