“Climate Vultures, Plastic Futures”

As part of the all-online Whole Earth Festival, I will be presenting the co-authored, cross-cut presentation”Climate Vultures, Plastic Futures” with Anuj Vaidya. This paper/presentation/zoom/nickelodeon is a mosaic, an exquisite corpse, a collaboration (between Jessica Stokes, Anuj Vaidya, Various Vultures, and many vignettes of scholarship and friendship and activism). In film editing, crosscutting works to show two events that occur during a shared chronology; it is an act of montage that generates meaning both through the relationships of images and narratives and the absence of images and narratives. Our work cross cuts by bringing together ecological stories that are place-specific, transnational, and necessarily partial. These cuts are put in tension to show simultaneous crises of vulture lives and plastic ecologies that trouble any singular perspective of environmental justice.

Our talk and others can be accessed via the festival’s Twitch Channel linked here.