Centre for Culture and Ecology

03/05/2026

We will also host Dr Molly Geidel from Dartmouth College for an in-person talk on Monday 11 May at 4pm in Elvet Riverside, 278.

Picturing Growth: Book Talk on The Development Film in the Americas

According to the logic of development, the world is an array of extractible resources and the extraction and commodification of those resources is conflated with both the forward trajectory of history and the general improvement of life. How did this logic become so compelling to so many? To answer this question, Molly Geidel’s 2025 book The Development Film in the Americas argues that a subgenre of documentary film was pivotal in the instantiation of development logic in the 1940s, when the global organising framework of racial civilisation was breaking down. The book examines dozens of these documentary films that dramatised the logic of development, often made in the Americas by artists working for government agencies and international organisations. At once art, propaganda, and social science, the films encouraged influential and ordinary viewers alike to connect brutal and polluting processes of extraction and work speedup to a better future. The book talk focuses on a few films from the 1940s that introduced and popularised developmentalist ideas about poverty, the economy, and the natural world.

Molly Geidel is an associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of The Development Film in the Americas, published by UC press in 2025, as well as Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties, published by University of Minnesota Press in 2015. Her third book, Theory of the Counterinsurgent Girl, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press’s Elements in Feminism and Contemporary Critical Theory series.

03/05/2026

New Talk by CCE (Online): by Dr. Nicholas Beuret:

Or Something Worse. Why We Need to Disrupt the Climate Transition

Trump’s attack on Venezuela and Iran, Reform’s anti-net zero rhetoric and widespread corporate climate backsliding all seem to indicate that the transition to a low carbon economy is well and truly over. Yet this couldn’t be further from the truth. Profound changes to the global political economy are underway, producing far-reaching impacts from production and work to governance and street-level politics. But these changes, this transition, is far from the ideal presented through political dreams such as the Green New Deal. Instead, we potentially face something worse - both green and unjust. Beuret’s book Or Something Worse maps out this emerging political economy, exploring the conflicts and struggles that are shaping the future.

Bio: Nicholas Beuret is a lecturer in political economy at the University of Essex. With a background in both activism and academia, he explores the intersections of climate change, capitalism, and social justice. He continues to map out the climate transition each week on Substack: https://nicholasbeuret.substack.com/



The talk will be online on Teams at the following link:

https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/368060818147416?p=GRBvFxYkikBs93OEX7

Meeting ID: 368 060 818 147 416

Passcode: KB2xG7mY

31/03/2026

On Tuesday April 21, we'll be hosting an in-person (non-recorded) one-day symposium on "Culture and the 21st-Century Agrarian Question" at Durham University. Details in the images, booking link in the comments. All welcome!

29/03/2026

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/23/earth-being-pushed-beyond-its-limits-as-energy-imbalance-reaches-record-high

State of the Climate report finds Earth’s energy has moved dangerously out of balance, with oceans absorbing vast majority of trapped heat

11/03/2026

As part of Durham University's Centre for Culture and Ecology’s ongoing seminar series, "Capitalism, Nature and Climate Change", Professor Mike Niblett (University of Warwick) will give the following online talk tomorrow at 5p.m. UK time:

"Plot, Plantationocene, and Caribbean Pulp Modernism"

Recent years have seen a remarkable surge in sf writing from the Caribbean by the likes of Karen Lord, Rita Indiana, Nalo Hopkinson, Tobias S. Buckell, Curdella Forbes, Marlon James, and Kacen Callender. Much of this work deploys the conventions, tropes, and devices of sf to register and challenge the racism, classism, sexism, and ecocide on which the modern capitalist world-system is founded. In this talk, I examine Caribbean sf as a form of peripheral or ‘pulp’ modernism capable of charting the colonial and imperialist roots of the current planetary crisis.

If you'd like to join, message Daniel Hartley for a Teams link. (Or send me -Kerstin Oloff at Durham - a message to forward you the link).

03/10/2025

Dear all,

The talk by Dr Olga Smith will happen today at CCE in Durham. It will be on the "Ecopolitical Aesthetics of Weeds". Please join us for free on the teams talk. It is on Thursday, today (15.01), at five pm (British Summer Time). Please email me beforehand ([email protected]) to access the link, and I will send it to you beforehand.

Olga Smith is an art historian and curator, based in the department of Fine Art, Newcastle University. With a focus on contemporary art, the international trajectory of her research has been supported through Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, Horizon 2020 (EU) and Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and spans topics such as ecocriticism and landscape, interchanges between art and intellectual ideas, transnational identity, and histories of photography. She has published extensively, including, as author, Contemporary Photography in France (2022), and, as editor, Photography and Landscape (2019) and Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture (2009).

Best wishes,
Kerstin

05/11/2024

This is to announce a talk by Dr Chris Campbell, which will be entitled “'It’s not where you go, it’s how you get there'”: Petromodernity, Automobility and Short Fiction in Trinidad." It will be on February 20 at 5pm.

Bio: Chris Campbell is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter, UK. He teaches and researches in the areas of world-literature, environmental criticism and postcolonial studies. He is co-editor of The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics (Liverpool University Press, 2017) and Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology and the Global Food System (Palgrave, 2021) and has published articles and chapters on world literature, Caribbean writing, and broadcast culture and decolonization in journals such as the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Green Letters, New Formations, and Wasafiri.

Abstract: This talk considers the role of short fiction in capturing petrolic lifeworlds in the world’s oldest petro-state, Trinidad. Moving from the literature of the 1930s to that of the early-twenty-first century, it examines the specific ways in which the short story has registered the ideologies and infrastructures of oil consumption and road-building. Short fiction has, at the same time, proven an expert literary form through which to foreground the classed, racialized and gendered exclusions of automobility. Following the work of Graeme MacDonald, and his reading of Italo Calvino’s short story “The Petrol Pump,” this chapter takes as its starting point another, largely under-regarded, petrol pump tale: Trinidadian Olga Yaatoff’s story “Gasoline Station” (1932) which offers an alternate peripheral-modernist vision of the ethics and economics of the pump-forecourt. Published in The Beacon magazine in 1932, Yaatoff’s story mediates the uneven effects of petromodernity in a dazzling narrative vignette focused on the workers and urbanites of Port-of-Spain. This chapter reads Yaatoff, and her association with the Beacon group, alongside and against contemporary petro-fictions in Trinidad. While Yaatoff’s story captures the “simmering” (de Boissière 2001) historical moment of an island on the verge of oil strikes and anti-colonial insurrection, Barbara Jenkins’ recent short stories “Sic Transit Wagon” and “It’s Not Where You Go, It’s How You Get There” (2013) register not only the class-based ennui and exhaustion of the era of “tough oil” (LeMenager 2014) but gestures, too, towards the (im)possibility of energy transition more generally.

Please find the zoom details below:
Join Zoom Meeting
https://durhamuniversity.zoom.us/j/99166511976?pwd=pZFrHkSCkHyv2wutfo3rywrGvWC13C.1

Meeting ID: 991 6651 1976
Passcode: 168104

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04/12/2023

Please sign and share.
https://innn.it/klimaforscher-entlassen?fbclid=IwAR2JXHx-OgsL9x02ugZpLEYVCzSRrmBW6h45Nv5E9YDa7NCjYCMWe8T9dgs

08/09/2023

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=617832657056231&set=a.431496302356535

Now available, Sean Nesselrode Moncada's "Refined Material: Petroculture and Modernity in Venezuela" is a comprehensive study of midcentury visual and material production that reevaluates Venezuelan modernism and its relationship to the global oil industry boom. Through case studies on a print magazine, a planned housing community, a luxury hotel, a museum installation, and a documentary film, Nesselrode Moncada argues that “oil operated as both the literal and symbolic engine of progress in Venezuela.”

Part of the University of California Press "Studies on Latin American Art" series, "Refined Material” is supported by a gift from ISLAA. For more information on the publication and other works in the series, visit https://islaa.org/publications/refined-material-petroculture-and-modernity-in-venezuela.

25/04/2023

The next talk in our 'Capital and Nature' series co-hosted with Durham Centre for Culture and Ecology is by Liam Campling (QMUL) and Alejandro Solás (Birkbeck) on maritime capitalism.

Come along to hear how oceans serve as trade route, fish bank, supply chain, and toxic dump for modern capital and carbon civilization.

Title: "Capitalism and the Sea"
Time: 4 PM, Thursday 4 May (UTC+1).
Register to receive Zoom link:
https://ucd-ie.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5MvduigpjMjHdUIrD5oIDgM0WafCk-PBjoV #/registration