Through online reading and discussion, Lucyle Hook, Professor of English and Africana Studies Kim Hall’s The Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Mastery and Pleasure in the Anglo Caribbean (The University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2025), centers the complicated history of sugar in order to ask what lies beyond its narrative of pleasure.

Bertha Estrada Huipe learned to make rebozos at the age of 11. Over her career as a dyer and weaver in Ahuirán, Mexico, she has mastered many kinds of knowledge: environmental, cultural, chemical, historical, and tacit. Over a residency at Columbia University, Bertha and her son Mateo shared their embodied knowledge with undergraduate and graduate students across disciplines in the Making and Knowing Project’s laboratory seminar class. The seminar investigates embodied knowledge, historical techniques, and the intersections between artistic making and scientific knowing.

Textiles and the fashion industry are a driver of environmental harms from toxic dye runoff to used garments piling up in landfills. While ‘fast fashion’ trends are the focus of most concern, the industry as a whole is far from sustainable, accounting for roughly 20% of worldwide water pollution and 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Speakers will survey the environmental costs of fashion and explore promising new sustainable techniques of creating pigments, colors, dyes, and fabrics through biological alternatives.

Indigenous craft practices and languages are powerful markers of cultural heritage and identity. They connect communities to their Land, their environment, and ground indigenous knowledge systems. Unsurprisingly, both have been targets of suppression and erasure by colonizing forces. Speakers will explore the connections between recent efforts to revitalize Indigenous languages and arts across the Americas and consider how they connect to local environments and knowledge systems.

Join us for an engaging joint-book discussion with Professors Darlène Dubuisson (University of California - Berkeley) and Prisca Gayles (University of Nevada - Reno) as they explore the intersecting themes of their recent books, Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures (Rutgers University Press, 2024) and Pain into Purpose (Cambridge University Press, 2024), respectively. Registration is required.