Video / Audio  Columbia University

In this presentation, Catriona Sandilands, an internationally recognized scholar in both queer ecologies and plant studies, will speak about "botanical queerness" with an eye to thinking through the complexity of humans' relations to plants beyond habitual environmentalist modes of address. Plants are not simply objects of human concern; they offer up modes of being. becoming, living, and futurity that have been overlooked in many more animal-centric accounts, and that may serve as the basis of a more critical, queer, and ecological understanding of life in relation to power.

Internationally acclaimed writer and director Sulayman Al Bassam in conversation with his collaborator Georgina Van Welie on making theatre across the cultural divide. Political by definition, performed in both English and Arabic with actors and a creative team from across the Arab world and the West, their projects have revisited Western texts from an Arab perspective and challenged Western perceptions of the Arab world. They will discuss their ten year Arab Shakespeare project, a recent production for The Comedie Francaise in Paris and Sulayman’s new play The Petrol Station. The new play follows the lives of a pair of half-brothers as they vie for the loyalty and favors of their aging father, all against the backdrop of a vicious civil war of a neighboring country.