Hot off the press from MIT this month.

Please join us for the launch of this book on the Alberta Oil Sands, by authors Matt Hern and Am Johal, illustrated by the internationally recognized cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco.

Author Matt Hern will be at the University of Alberta to give a presentation on this recently released book. Following that, four respondents will give short provocations on their reactions to the book. We will then open up the floor, for a larger conversation with the audience. Everyone is welcome.

Some coffee and snacks will be available.

Dr. Matt Hern:

Matt Hern is a community organizer from East Vancouver, BC ( səlil’wətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) territory. He is the co-director of Stay Solid Industries, teaches at several universities and lectures widely. He is the author of many books, including What a City is For: Remaking the Politics of Displacement (MIT, 2016) and Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life (MIT, 2018).

Respondents:

Dr. Angele Alook is proud member of Bigstone Cree Nation, an Indigenous labour researcher for the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE), Staff Advisor on the Environmental Committee for AUPE, and steering-committee member for the Indigenous Labour History Project for ALHI (Alberta Labour History Institute). Dr. Alook also brings Indigenous and feminist perspectives and research methods to several Canada Tri-Council-funded initiatives concerned with climate and energy justice, including the Corporate Mapping Project and Just Powers.

Ariel Kroon is a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta, studying Canadian post-apocalyptic science fiction published between 1948 and 1989. She analyzes the imagination of crisis and disaster from an ecological standpoint and is in the process of evaluating these texts as the grounds of an alternate imaginary, one inflected by authors’ struggles with gendered identity, colonial rule, environmental consciousness, cultural continuance, and the ever-present threat of a nuclear apocalypse despite not belonging to a major world power. She holds a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship and has published both scholarly work and poetry.

Dr. Rhys Williams is a Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Research Fellow at Glasgow University. His research is focused on questions of genre, energy, environment, and pedagogy, in particular using the tools of contemporary genre to make meaningful and desirable alternative futures. He has published in Science Fiction Studies and Paradoxa, and is the editor of Paradoxa 26: SF Now.

For more information on this book follow this link.