Bio: Dara Craig is a PhD candidate in the University of Oregon’s Environmental Sciences, Studies, and Policy Program. As a non-Indigenous researcher, her dissertation focuses on coastal co-governance, healing, and Māori self-determination in Tīkapa Moana/the Hauraki Gulf, a nationally significant seascape in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Dara is also committed to place-based, community-engaged research in the Pacific Northwest, where she has worked in collaboration with the Glacier Lab, PNW Tribal Climate Change Project, and PNW Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice. She holds a BA in Anthropology and Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology from Vanderbilt University.

 

Project: What if healing Tīkapa Moana (the Hauraki Gulf)—a nationally treasured marine ecosystem in Aotearoa (New Zealand)—and seascapes around the world begins not solely with ecological modeling or stakeholder workshops, but with reweaving intra- and inter-species relations? The Ahu Moana initiative envisions coastal co-governance rooted in partnership between iwi (Tribes) and local communities along Tīkapa Moana. However, despite broad support, the work unfolds within fractured social ecologies shaped by extractive colonial histories, contested values, and opponents’ anti-Indigenous rhetoric. Rather than treating Tīkapa Moana as a backdrop for human decision-making, this dissertation asks: how might we think, (co-)govern, and heal with the Gulf? It centers the Gulf as an active presence with mauri (life force) and as a third party in co-governance—not a space to manage, but an ancestor to engage. By foregrounding Tīkapa Moana’s agency amidst politics of co-governance, this dissertation offers a relational framework for coastal care in Aotearoa and beyond.

Bio: Rachael Sol Lee is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Environmental Studies Department at the University of Oregon on Kalapuya Ilihi, with affiliations in English and the New Media and Culture program. Her interdisciplinary research explores the work of contemporary artists within the Korean diaspora whose evolving mixed-media practices engage with ancestral, land-based traditions. Her research lies at the intersection of the environmental humanities, critical diaspora studies, digital and emerging technologies, and performance studies. Alongside her scholarship, she sustains an artistic practice focused on textile-based installation, sculpture, and performance art. She enjoys walking along coastlines and surfing the web.

 

Project: This dissertation – Site Unseen: Spectral Art Practices of the Korean Diaspora – studies contemporary artists of the Korean diaspora whose evolving practices center on remembering ancestral land-based traditions. Using experimental mixed-media methods that disrupt and elide colonial ways of seeing/sensing, these artists speculatively reanimate their imbrication within lines of intergenerational cultural transmission severed by various waves of colonization, war, and imperialism on the Korean Peninsula. Their work challenges the Western canonization of Land art (and associated realms of site-specificity and installation art) that extends settler frameworks of terra nullius into artistic conventions, especially via their uses of digital and emerging technologies informed by critical embodied perspectives on the virtuality of place. I argue that diasporic reconnection with ancestral land-based traditions, occurring in meaningful solidarity and relationship with Indigenous sovereignty movements, is vital in our present context of settler-induced global climate catastrophe.