Desert Distortion: Social Transformation Lab Postdoctoral Scholar Lecture

Join Social Transformation Lab for its first Postdoctoral Scholar Lecture featuring Dr. Celina Osuna.

About this event: In a challenge to desert-as-void thinking, this seminar explores the reciprocal bonds between place, stories, and animacies that reveal the multiplicity and possibility of desert places by turning to the poetry of three Indigenous women writers—Ofelia Zepeda, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Natalie Diaz. Through close readings and an interdisciplinary analysis bridging the Environmental Humanities and Indigenous Studies, Osuna employs desert distortion to emphasize story as an epistemological practice.

Meet the Scholar: Celina Osuna is a scholar and artist, and is currently the inaugural Postdoctoral Scholar for the Social Transformation Lab at Arizona State University. Her research explores aesthetics of desert places in literature, art, and film and their impact on cultural imagination and geopolitical relationships to land, with an emphasis on Indigenous and Latinx Environmentalisms. Her monograph Desert Distortion is under contract with Texas Tech University Press and explores distortion as a desirable technique emerging from entanglements with desert places—their stories, material conditions, representations—through which the human “we” become better kin to our other than human relatives and each other. She is also co-editor of a forthcoming volume titled Storied Deserts: Reimagining Global Arid Lands.

Desert Distortion: Social Transformation Lab Postdoctoral Scholar Lecture

Thursday, Jan. 26

11 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/desert-distortion-social-transformation-lab-postdoctoral-scholar-lecture-tickets-510752563667

Learn more about scholar and artist, Celina Osuna on her website: https://www.celinaosuna.com/

Learn more about the Social Transformation Lab: https://stl.asu.edu/