Join the Weatherhead Center Canada Program for their Canada Seminar featuring Emma Gilheany, William Lyon Mackenzie King Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead Canada Program, and Affiliate, Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP).

Abstract: In this talk, I explore an analytic I have developed called cryo nullius—where icy scapes are perceived by settlers as spectacular, vast, and un-peopled. This perception allows for the conditions of infrastructural violence to manifest in the circumpolar north. I focus in particular on Cold War-era US Air Force radar bases that spanned the circumpolar north as well as present-day Inuit environmental practices to avoid toxicity that has seeped into the land and water from these ruins of technological excess. I argue that Nunatsiavummiut reject this colonial perception of and violence on their sovereign land through the specific materiality of the sub-Arctic. This work is a highly collaborative multi-modal anthropology that engages evidence including archaeological survey, ethnographic research, Inuit oral histories, and archives produced by Inuit governments, missionaries, and the USAF. This project foregrounds Nunatsiavummiut future-making to critique erasures of Indigenous politics and specific environmental harms in discourses of the climate crisis and Anthropocene.

Join the Harvard Human Rights Journal and the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic for a talk by Dr. Daniel Gustafson, Special Representative of the Director-General at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), former Deputy Director-General of the Organization, on “Ensuring the Right to Food in the Face of Climate Change: The Role of UN FAO.”

The talk addresses the interrelations between climate change and global hunger from the perspective of the UN FAO, highlighting how climate change exacerbates food insecurity and hinders the full realization of the right to food, while also examining how food systems contribute to climate change and why their transformation seems essential for both food security and climate mitigation. Dr. Gustafson will provide insights on the UN FAO’s role and current activities, recent challenges and initiatives by countries related to climate change and the right to food. He has over 40 years of international experience working on approaches linking science and policy for food security, sustainable agricultural transformation and capacity development, having been the UN FAO’s Country Representative in Kenya, Somalia, India and Bhutan. Moderated by Professor Emily Broad Leib.