Bio: Mark Carey is a Professor jointly appointed in the Environmental Studies Program and the Geography Department at the University of Oregon. He runs the Glacier Lab for the Study of Ice and Society, collaborating with students and scientists to study environmental history, ice humanities, critical physical geography, and climate justice in the Arctic, Andes, and Pacific Northwest. In addition to many articles and book chapters, he wrote In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society and has co-edited two volumes: The High-Mountain Cryosphere and The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History. Recent research has been funded primarily by the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Project: Unruly Icebergs

Every year, hundreds of Arctic icebergs drift down to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and sail right into the profit margins of oil companies drilling offshore. This is Iceberg Alley, where governments and corporations have tried since the mid-1800s to tame what they see as unruly icebergs. The book that this summer fellowship supports tells the history of doing business and trying to contain unruly icebergs in Iceberg Alley. It traces efforts to control and predict unpredictable icebergs, while illuminating the images, storylines, and narratives that turned ice into an enemy. Many businesses have worked with unruly ice–from the first transatlantic telegraph that was crushed by an iceberg, to the oil companies that now tow bergs away from their rigs, to the beverage companies making Iceberg Vodka and Iceberg Beer. The book advances the concept of “unruly environments” by incorporating the blue humanities, cryopolitics, and ice humanities.

Bio: Yu-Fang Cho is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Oregon. Her research and teaching centers transnational and decolonial feminist approaches to intersecting modalities of social inequities that have emerged from the long history of the United States’ entangled relationship with Asia and the Pacific. As a transdisciplinary scholar, she is committed to developing relational and comparative feminist methods that speak across different fields in response to contemporary issues, from the contentious gay marriage debate in the US to environmental challenges in Asia and the Pacific. She is the author of Uncoupling American Empire: Cultural Politics of Deviance and Unequal Difference, 1890–1910 (SUNY, 2013) and the co-editor of the 2017 special issue of American, “The Chinese Factor: Reorienting Global Imaginaries in American Studies.” Her research has been supported by Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities, the National Research Institute of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Taiwan, the Bancroft Library, the Huntington Library, among others.

Project: Her current book project examines post-Fukushima transpacific literary and cultural production in relation to the genealogy of the post-WWII ideological shift of nuclear power from a death-making weapon to a technology of good life. This project seizes media preoccupation with nuclear threats from Asia during and after the tragic disaster of the Fukushima power plant meltdown in March 2011 as a key entry point to grappling with the various forms that the enduring yet obscured presence of death-making racial violence of nuclearism in the Pacific has fundamentally shaped post-WWII transpacific nuclear modernity. Portions of the manuscript have been published in Amerasia, Cultural Studies, and Racial Ecologies (Washington UP, 2018). With the support of CEF Summer Faculty Award, she will conduct research on anti-nuclear activisms from the Marshall Islands and finish drafting a chapter.

Bio: Dr. Kory Russel’s work focuses on the design, implementation, and experience of non-networked water and sanitation services specifically in resource constrained locations around the world. He did foundational research and design on Container-Based Sanitation in collaboration with SOIL in Haiti. He also helped found the Container-Based Sanitation Alliance (cbsa.global) in 2016, the Landscape for Humanity initiative (www.landscape4humanity.org) in 2019, and is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Science at the University of Oregon. He is also currently the Co-Chair of the Container-Based Sanitation Alliance as well as serving on the advisory boards of PHLUSH, SOIL, and LeapFrog Design. He holds a BS in Environmental Biology and MS in Environmental Science from Taylor University as well as an MS and PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University.

Project: For this Center for Environmental Futures project, I will be curating an exhibition of images gathered using photovoice methodology by residents of dense informal urban settlements. These residents documented their daily reality seeking and using sanitation facilities in Lima, Peru; Nairobi, Kenya; and Cape Town South Africa with funding from the UK government (ESRC GCRF grant). The images were previously used to raise government awareness and spur action around the public health and environment crisis caused by insufficient and inequitable access to sanitation. The exhibition will take place at the University of Oregon in Fall Quarter 2025 followed by a second exhibition in Portland starting on World Toilet Day (Nov. 19, 2025) in collaboration with the organization PHLUSH (https://phlush.org/). Finally, a website and toolkit for creating future exhibits in other locations globally will be hosted by the Container-Based Sanitation Alliance (https://cbsa.global/).