Calendar
ICA Miami’s Knight Foundation Art + Research Center Swamp Symposium
This one-day symposium features a set of presentations and critical dialogues around the Everglades as a site of knowledge. The symposium will center indigenous ways of knowing as well as eco-critical engagements with the Everglades’ ecologies, considering both human and non-human relations to the land. Speakers are invited to present on critical histories of the Everglades, its ecological forms, particularities of its biodiversity, and questions of fragility and restoration, among other topics.
2-3: Talk by Dr. Zachary Caple with Q&A
Title: The Wood Storks of Lake Somerset: Multispecies landscapes of the Holocene/Anthropocene boundary event
3-4: Talk by Dr. Jessica Cattelino with Q&A
4:00-4:30: Coffee Break
4:40-5:30 Talk by Dr. Laura Ogden with Q&A
Title: Swamplife
In this presentation, Laura Ogden discusses key moments in the social and political history of the Everglades, with attention to how this history continues to shape contemporary debates. This talk is based on Ogden’s long-term anthropological research on Everglades cultural history and contemporary restoration politics.
About Dr. Zachary Caple
Zachary Caple is an environmental anthropologist at Aarhus University, Denmark and a 2023/24 ACLS Fellow. His forthcoming book The Human Asteroid Strikes Florida: The Mining Landscapes and Anthrobiogeochemistry of Phosphorus investigates the human-altered phosphorus cycle as an agent of multispecies landscape change in Florida.
About Dr. Jessica Cattelino
Jessica Cattelino’s research focuses on economy, nature, indigeneity, and settler colonialism. Her book, High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Duke University Press, 2008; winner of the Delmos Jones and Jagna Sharff Memorial Book Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of North America), examines the cultural, political, and economic stakes of tribal casinos for Florida Seminoles. Currently, she is writing an ethnography about the cultural value of water in the Florida Everglades, with focus on the Seminole Big Cypress Reservation and the nearby agricultural town of Clewiston. This project tells the human story of Everglades restoration and theorizes the co-production of nature and indigeneity in settler societies like the United States. Additionally, she leads a research team at the Center for the Study of Women that is completing an ethnographic study of gender and everyday household water use in Los Angeles. The study is funded by the UCLA Grand Challenge on Sustainable Los Angeles. She writes about indigeneity and money, the anthropology of the United States, and indigenous sovereignty, and is collaborating with photographer Adam Nadel on a museum exhibition about the inextricability of people and nature in the Everglades.
Dr. Cattelino’s work is influenced by scholarship in American Indian Studies and Gender Studies, and she holds faculty affiliations in both programs at UCLA. Her current research is funded by the National Science Foundation (Law and Social Sciences), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. Additionally, her work is funded through participation in a National Science Foundation Long Term Ecological Network on the Florida Coastal Everglades, for which she is undertaking wildly interdisciplinary collaboration as a co-author of a paper on phosphorus and will conduct ethnographic research on the social life of a stormwater treatment area. Recently Dr. Cattelino was a Visiting Associate Professor of American Studies at Yale University.
About Dr. Laura Ogden
Laura A. Ogden is an environmental anthropologist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Her work explores the politics of environmental change and conservation, contributing to theoretical discussions in political ecology and environmental anthropology. She has conducted ethnographic research in the Florida Everglades, with urban communities in the United States, and is currently working on a long-term project in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. Her books include Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades (2011) and Loss and Wonder at the World’s End (2021). She has served as President of the Anthropology and Environment Society, a section of the American Anthropological Society.