Dust reconfigures understandings of migration and destabilizes stories that borders are solid and stable. In its inherent mobility, it transgresses geopolitical borders and boundaries, regardless of political and financial investments in formalizing, securing, and policing such borders. Recognizing dust as endemic to a planetary eco-social process of interdependence that is inherently and continuously mobile, moving, and shifting, interrupts normative readings of the global migration of people and matter. This lecture uses the movement of dust as an analytic for exposing the ways that the European Union reproduces its borders within Libya in order to halt migration across the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea. Mapping itinerant dust as a means for understanding the intrinsic mobility of global social and environmental flows decenters geopolitical boundaries and borders in favor of engaging transcontinental and transoceanic processes that reframe all movement (people and material) as not only routine but as required and critical for the health and vitality of the planet.
Danika Cooper is associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores how geopolitical agendas often determine relationships with our environments. Her scholarly and creative work explore alternatives to Euro-Western understandings of the aridlands, and in particular, offers multiple ways of knowing, being, and engaging with dry landscapes to better inform current environmental and landscape architecture discourse and practice. She has published and exhibited her work across the world, and has practiced architecture and landscape architecture both in the United States and in India.
The event is part of the Art History Seminar 220B, and is moderated by Professor Lamia Balafrej (UCLA).
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA Division of Humanities