Events

Sasha Crawford-Holland Media Studies, Vanderbilt University

In 2008, the Inupiaq community of Kivalina filed a lawsuit against the largest greenhouse gas emitters in the United States, seeking damages for the rising temperatures destroying their island home. After years of litigation, courts dismissed Kivalina’s claims on evidentiary grounds: their injuries were not “traceable” to the defendants’ actions. Although irrefutable scientific research links emissions to heat to harm, plaintiffs could not conclusively attribute specific impacts to discrete perpetrators. Heat’s nebulous, atmospheric mediation precluded Kivalina’s access to legal redress.

This presentation elucidates how the legal doctrine of traceability functions as an aesthetic principle governing environmental justice. Analyzing legal and advocate media as aesthetic infrastructures that scaffold this mode of perception, I show that they exonerate structural violence by reducing harm to direct, physical impacts. Thermal violence fundamentally eludes the aesthetics of traceability. I argue that global heating invites—and requires—us to envision more capacious infrastructures of justice and accountability.

Sasha Crawford-Holland, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Vanderbilt University, focuses on the relations between media, violence, and social justice. His work has been published in J.C.M.S., Film History, Television & New Media, the London Review of International Law, Jump Cut, Synoptique, and the collection Indigenous Media Arts in Canada. Sasha is currently working on a book about how media make sense of oppressive heat.

This event is being co-sponsored by the Environmental Studies Program, UC Santa Barbara.