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A Conversation on Climate Justice with Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs (Virtual Event)

April 14, 2022 @ 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm

ID: Graphic features a black and white photo of Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Text reads, “A Conversation about Climate Justice with Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs Winner of the Whiting Award for her book Uncrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. The conversation with Dr. Gumbs will be led by students from Baruch’s Black and Latino Studies capstone course “Climate Justice is Racial Justice” Thursday, April 14 at 1pm via Zoom Register https://tinyurl.com/climagebls Presented by the Baruch Weissman Dept of Black and Latino Studies, Dept of English via Globus Lectures, and Weissman Dean’s Office.” Below the text is a logo that reads, “We are climate action Lecture Series.”On Thursday, April 14th at 1pm ET, join Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs for a conversation about Climate Justice led by students from Baruch’s Black and Latino Studies capstone course “Climate Justice is Racial Justice.”

Register here!

This event is presented by the Department of Black and Latino Studies, the Department of English via Globus Lectures, and the Dean’s Office at Baruch’s Weissman School of Arts and Sciences.

Undrowned is a book-length meditation for the entire human species, based on the subversive and transformative lessons of marine mammals. Alexis Pauline Gumbs has spent hundreds of hours watching our aquatic cousins. She has found them to be queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions humans have imposed on the ocean. Employing a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility, naturalist observation, and Black feminist insights, she translates their submerged wisdom to reveal what they might teach us. The result is a powerful work of creative nonfiction that produces not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wonder and questioning.

Part of the “Emergent Strategy” series, the book is divided into eighty short meditations, each grouped into “movements” with names like “Listen,” “Breath,” “Stay Black,” and “Go Deep.” A graceful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice, it explores themes that range from the ways that echolocation might inform our understandings of visionary action to the similar ways that humans and marine mammals do—or might—adapt within our increasingly dire circumstances. Gumbs’s narrative moves seamlessly between dolphins born in captivity and Black political prisoners giving birth behind bars, between the migratory patterns of dolphins and the Atlantic slave trade. An absolutely unique read!

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist FugitivityM Archive: After the End of the World, and Dub: Finding Ceremony. She is a 2022 Whiting Award Winner in nonfiction.