If “climate apartheid” is on the rise, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò warns, then Cop City Atlanta—the multimillion-dollar new police training facility built by clear-cutting the city’s largest green space—offers an ominous flashpoint. For not only is Cop City’s contested construction (which is ongoing) an exemplary story of the violent repression of community activism at the nexus of abolition, decolonization, and environmentalism. It also spotlights the forces of contemporary counterinsurgency—including its aesthetic modalities—that are operating to prevent any political transformation beyond the status quo. If the environmental movement is losing in the struggle to stop world-ending climate change, then continuing to focus on practices of ecological repair is increasingly myopic, even escapist, without taking into account the forces blocking any meaningful change. How might a prehensive climate-justice-directed art history, and an insurgent arts of the possible, meaningfully respond?

T. J. Demos is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. Demos is the author of several books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); and The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013) – winner of the College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award. He co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-21). His new book, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come, 2023, is out from Sternberg Press.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.

Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.