Today's Messages

Please join the Biology Department and the Great Lakes Center for the seminar “In the Slipstreams of High Modernism: The Historical Production of the Asian Carp Invasion,” presented by Dr. Jordan Fox on Monday, April 6, at 3:00 p.m. in SAMC 151.

Research Seminar Abstract: At the heart of this presentation lies a paradox. While we have never been better at manipulating environments, never have our environmental relationships been more fragile, or more alarming. While this talk will not claim that this paradox can be resolved with any one method or action, it will claim that one reason for our dire socio-environmental present is that our overwhelming response to socio-environmental risk and uncertainty is to try to reduce, and ultimately ignore, social and ecological complexity. To demonstrate, I will use the case of the Asian carp, a suite of invasive fish that are, according to many, threatening to enter and permanently alter socioenvironmental life in the Great Lakes. This case is not only a story of a nonhuman species invading spaces in which we thought we were in control. It is a problem that cascaded through the century’s long, complex interactions of ostensibly separate and distinct socio-environmental interventions.