Events: Kritika Kultura Lecture Series presents Simon C. Estok

February 27, 2019

Kritika Kultura, the international refereed journal of language, literary, and cultural studies of the Department of English, Ateneo de Manila University, will host a lecture by Simon C. Estok. The lecture—titled "An Intersectional Approach to Food Justice and Environmental Justice"—is on Mar. 12, 2019, from 5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., at SOM 111 (Ching Tan Room), Ateneo de Manila University. This lecture is made possible through a grant obtained by Kritika Kultura under the Internationalization Program of the Loyola Schools, Ateneo de Manila University. The event is open to the public. 

About the lecture

While there has been a tremendous amount of attention lately (both in fiction and in theory) to the links between environmental justice and food, there has also been tremendous resistance (both in theory and in practice). In a breath-taking recent analysis of dietary habits in the age of terror, Laura Wright’s The Vegan Project offers important insights about how in the American imagination, the challenge veganism poses is distinctly political, a threat to a consumer way of life, to a system of production, to an economic ideology. With the dietary other a political other, subject to similar regimes of discipline, comestibles become ideological weapons. An intersectional approach to this matter is sorely needed, an approach that takes account of the interplay among the ethics of ecophobia, environmental racism, and transnational capitalism. This talk will review some of the fictional and theoretical work done linking environmental justice and food and will propose that not only is it urgent to talk for the present about the ethical underpinnings of food injustice and environmental injustice but that things are going to get much, much worse as many regions find themselves unable to grow their traditional foods—an effect that will continue as a result both of corporate imperialism and, more disturbingly, of climate change.  If there is any hope for the future (in an age when people such as Mr. Trump can brazenly tell bare-faced lies without reprisals), then it is in understanding how our ethics have gotten us to where we are and how only broad-scale ethical changes will get us out. An intersectional approach may take us there.

About the resource person

Simon C. Estok currently holds the award of Foreign Expert of the Double First Class Discipline Cluster (2018-2021) at Sichuan University and is a full professor and Senior Research Fellow at Sungkyunkwan University (South Korea’s first and oldest university). Estok teaches literary theory, ecocriticism, and Shakespearean literature. His award-winning book Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia appeared in 2011 (reprinted 2014), and he is co-editor of three books: Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination (Routledge, 2016), International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism (Routledge, 2013), and East Asian Ecocriticisms (Macmillan, 2013). His latest book is the much anticipated The Ecophobia Hypothesis (Routledge, 2018). Estok has published extensively on ecocriticism and Shakespeare in such journals as PMLAMosaicConfigurationsEnglish Studies in Canada, and others.

About Kritika Kultura

Kritika Kultura is acknowledged by a host of Asian and Asian American Studies libraries and scholarly networks, and indexed in the MLA International Bibliography, Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Clarivate), Scopus, EBSCO, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP). For inquiries about submission guidelines and future events, visit http://journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/kk or email [email protected].


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