As climate risks will intensify, a two-day symposium will examine the concept of “climate havens,” with particular attention to the Great Lakes region as a site of relative environmental resilience. Bringing together historical, philosophical, artistic, literary, and cultural perspectives, the symposium will explore how havens have been imagined as spaces of collective refuge and communal care; will interrogate the ethical and social questions of access, exclusion, and justice shaped by race, gender, class, and histories of dispossession; and will consider the role of ecosystems, natural resources, and Indigenous and local knowledge in fostering just and sustainable communities.

Topics will include climate and historical migration, water politics, environmental ethics and justice, narratives of home and displacement, urban planning, and cultural and ecological loss. The symposium will be held over two days, with sessions hosted at the University of Rochester and the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York.

The symposium will be held across two days, with day 1 convening at the University of Rochester and day 2 at the Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, NY)

 Funded by the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, the Institute for Human Health and the Environment of the University of Rochester, and  the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Mellon Foundation

Click here to view the event program.