"A Visual Narrative of Labour Migration and the Environment"
In conversation with:
Kate Beaton, Cartoonist; Writer; Illustrator; Author, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands.

Katie Mazer, Assistant Professor, Women and Gender Studies and Environmental and Sustainability Studies, Acadia University.
Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania.

To center the Middle East in scholarly discourse on disasters, the Disaster Studies Initiative at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, is pleased to announce an international conference, scheduled to take place from March 28 to 30, 2025. We thank the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs for their generous support.

In this day and age, under the shadow of debates surrounding the intensifying climate crisis, is it still possible to think of disasters such as earthquakes, floods, fires, and wars as significant events? Are they political events at all? For whom are they non-eventful, and for whom are they still experienced as shocks and ruptures? If they are no longer analytically or politically relevant events, what are we to make of the landscape, trauma, pain, and avenues of desirable change that disasters often generate? How, then, should we deal with disasters—both past and present?

This presentation will examine the impact of climate change on health through patient cases, providing a framework for assessing climate-related health risks and discussing integrative approaches to care. It will also explore how environmental factors influence integrative medicine, including the role of nature-based therapies in supporting patient well-being, focusing on adapting these strategies for low-income communities and urban areas with limited access to green spaces.

Wynne Armand, MD
Associate Director, Mass General Center for the Environment and Health
Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School

Barbara Walker, PhD
Integrative Health and Performance Psychologist, University of Cincinnati, College of Medicine

Passing environmental policy is difficult, because of the – reasonable – concern that it will increase costs. But implementation often leads to systemic changes that make environmental regulation cheaper and easier to implement than expected.

In the Energy Policy Seminar, Beth DeSombre will examine domestic and international regulations to protect the ozone layer, and aspects of the U.S. Clean Air Act regulating power plant and automobile emissions, identifying four specific pathways through which system changes contribute to decreasing costs: disruption of standard operating procedures, innovation, increased availability of alternatives, and creation of enabling mechanisms. Understanding how the implementation of regulations can decrease costs can suggest better or worse approaches to crafting and implementing policy.

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.

The symposium will be a one-day event held at Pound Hall (tentative) at HLS, accommodating approximately 50 attendees. The event will feature six to seven invited speakers who are experts in environmental justice and heat exposure, a poster session, and a networking session. This event is open to public. The primary purpose of this symposium is to foster collaboration and knowledge exchange in addressing environmental injustice in a world with increasing heat exposure. This symposium is highly multidisciplinary and welcome members from academia, law, policy, and community organizations.