Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions

Jeff Diamanti is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities (Cultural Analysis & Philosophy) at the University of Amsterdam. In 2016-17 he was the Media@McGill Postdoctoral Fellow in Media and the Environment where he co-convened the international colloquium on Climate Realism, the results of which appear in a book collection on  Routledge and a double issue of Resilience. His first book, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum: Locating Terminal Landscapes (Bloomsbury 2021) tracks the political and media ecology of fossil fuels across the extractive and logistical spaces that connect remote territories like Greenland to the economies of North America and Western Europe. His new research, Bloom Ecologies details the return to natural philosophy in the marine and atmospheric sciences studying the interactive dynamics of the cryosphere and hydrosphere in the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean. He co-directs the ASCA Political Ecologies Seminar with Joost de Bloois, and with Amanda Boetzkes, he co-organizes “At the Moraine,” an ongoing research project on the political ecology of glacial retreat in the Arctic. With Fred Carter, he co-directs the FieldARTS arts and science residency in Amsterdam, NL.

Amelia Moore is Associate Professor of Marine Affairs at the University of Rhode Island. Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist at the University of California Berkeley, her focal research areas have spanned from science studies of tropical conservation biology to black marine ecologies to the anticolonial and antiracist examination of the practice of STEM in American academia. She has worked with government officials, nonprofit administrators, environmental activists, and a wide array of community members in The Bahamas, Indonesia, and the United States. Dr. Moore’s first book, Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in The Bahamas, explores the fraught ways in which the ecological sciences and the tourism industry work together to transform the way people understand and unevenly profit from the islands of The Bahamas in an era of global environmental change.  She is currently collaborating on a documentary film, Decolonizing Science? (working title), that interrogates the unjust foundations of scientific research and explores attempts to move beyond the colonial structures of contemporary knowledge production.