University Ecologies event with Bayley Marquez, 4/3
Please join us for the second event of a new series, University Ecologies and the Question of the Commons. We aspire to host conversations that cut across disciplines, schools, and divisions of labor to reimagine environmental knowledge, relations, and expertise. Over the next three years, this project’s events and working groups will examine how university knowledge has historically underpinned the creation of inequitable environments and agricultures, while exploring ways to build more sustainable and just ecologies on our campus and beyond.
This talk examines methods of agricultural education tied to institutions of higher education such as agricultural experiment stations, the Tuskegee moveable school, and demonstration farms as technologies of plantation pedagogy. These technologies not only targeted Black and Native peoples as subjects who needed to change how they farmed land but also targeted land in order to transform the land itself and people and non-human kin's relationships to it. Thus, land, much like the bodies of Black and Native peoples, was seen as an appropriate subject of experimentation, and often one that institutions had limited accountability to. Through this talk, I argue that agricultural education is part of a broader system of plantation pedagogy where "what is done to people is done to land.”
Sponsors: Mellon Foundation; The Center for the Humanities at Tufts; Anthropology; Education; Environmental Studies; History; Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora; Science & Technology Studies; Sociology; Visual and Material Studies.
Please contact Amanda.pepper@tufts.edu with any questions.
