Launched in the Spring of 2020, the Race and Climate Reading group was created in response to Cooper Union student requests to invest in discussions that center issues of race and social justice and how they intersect with the climate crisis that we are all deeply mired in at the moment. As we all know, the climate crisis effects communities of color first, and disproportionately. And, as the readings all attest, this is reflective of and a culmination of centuries of oppression, and settler colonialism. The concept of the group:

• We read about the intersection of race and climate across multiple genres
• We privilege writers and thinkers of color

Friday, April 14, 1 – 3 pm Slow Disturbance by Rafico Ruiz

From the late nineteenth through most of the twentieth century, the evangelical Protestant Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, created a network of hospitals, schools, orphanages, stores, and industries with the goal of bringing health and organized society to settler fisherfolk and Indigenous populations. This infrastructure also served to support resource extraction of fisheries off Labrador's coast. In Slow Disturbance Rafico Ruiz engages with the Grenfell Mission to theorize how settler colonialism establishes itself through what he calls infrastructural mediation—the ways in which colonial lifeworlds, subjectivities, and affects come into being through the creation and maintenance of infrastructures. Drawing on archival documents, maps, interviews with municipal officials, teachers, and residents, as well as his field photography, Ruiz shows how the mission's infrastructural mediation—from its attempts to restructure the local economy to the aerial surveying and mapping of the coastline—responded to the colony's environmental conditions in ways that expanded the bounds of the settler frontier. By tracing the mission's history and the mechanisms that enabled its functioning, Ruiz complicates understandings of mediation and infrastructure while expanding current debates surrounding settler colonialism and extractive capitalism.

For questions, and for the texts, please email mackenzie.williams@cooper.edu.