"A Soundtrack for Black Ecologies", Thursday, March 28, 2023 from 4:30-6:00pm in 1008 Humanities and via Zoom.

Featuring Mary Annaïse Heglar, climate justice essayist and J.T. Roane, Rutgers University.

Moderated by Kevin Holt/MUS, Stony Brook University.

Zoom registration required. Please click here to register.

Listen to our event Spotify playlist.

A event is a listening-based exploration of ecology/environmental justice through the frame of black experience(s) guided by experts whose work in academia and activism speaks to this intersection. We will discuss how music permeates all aspects of our culture, be it as a medium for expressing our aspirations for the world we’d like to live on or as an unmarked supplement to our most mundane experiences.

Noted climate writer, editor, and professor Mary Annaïse Heglar's essays have appeared in The Cut, The Boston Globe, Vox, Rolling Stone, Wired, and other outlets. She is the author of the forthcoming This World is Yours to Cherish from Random House Kids (2024) and the editor of the recently announced Til Earth and Heaven Ring—an all-Black climate anthology with Pantheon Books (not yet scheduled). She is the co-host and co-creator of the Hot Take podcast and newsletter. In 2020, she was Columbia University Earth Institute’s first Writer-in-Residence. Mary is based in New Orleans and is an adjunct professor at Tulane University.

J.T. Roane has a joint appointment in the Department of Africana Studies as Assistant Professor and is the Andrew W. Mellow Chair in the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice. He was previously an Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Arizona State University and has been a dynamic leader of new scholarly interest in Black Ecologies. Dr. Roane's book, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place, is forthcoming with NYU Press. Dr. Roane is a 2022-23 Faculty Fellow in the School of Social Sciences in the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.