Oil+Water Conference Participants
Oil+Water: The Case of Southern California and Santa Barbara Participants
Keynote Speakers:
Stephanie LeMenager
Associate Professor
Department of English
UC Santa Barbara
Stephanie LeMenager received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1999. Her central interests include nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. literature and cultures, literatures of the North American West, environmental theories and representations, and rhetorics of slavery and freedom. She is the author of several articles and Manifest and Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions of the Nineteenth Century United States. Professor LeMenager is currently at work on her second book project, Loving Oil, Hating the Weather: A Literary History of Environmentalism 2.0.
Harvey Molotch
Professor
Social and Cultural Analysis
New York University
Harvey Molotch is known for studies that have reconceptualized power relations in interaction, the mass media, and the city. He helped create the field of environmental sociology and has advanced qualitative methods in the social sciences. In recent years, Molotch helped develop a new field—the sociology of objects.
Jim Nollman
Artist and Founder of interspecies.com
Jim Nollman is a sound artist and bio-acoustician. Born in Boston and educated at Tufts, in 1978 he founded what is generally regarded to be the world’s first organization that sponsors artists and musicians to explore interaction with wild animals and natural habitat: interspecies.com. Interspecies’ field projects include a high profile, 30 year study of performing live original music, transmitted underwater, to interact with wild whales and dolphins. Over the years, Nollman’s unique merger of music and science has been sponsored by National Geographic, The Smithsonian Institute, Japan EXPO, the Rudolph Steiner Foundation, The International Whaling Commission, The Russian Academy of Sciences, The European Union, and most recently, the US Navy. Nollman is the author of several books, including the critically acclaimed Why We Garden, and The Beluga Café. His output includes music for theater, underwater concerts, songs found on itunes, and radio music with 300 turkeys performed for Thanksgiving dinner. His much celebrated album, Orcas Greatest Hits, showcases real-time, unedited music created with whales.
Harry Reese
Professor
Art Studio
UC Santa Barbara
Harry Reese makes prints, artists’ books, paintings, and public art installations. In partnership with Sandra Liddell Reese, he publishes limited edition prints and books for their Turkey Press imprint. Featuring handmade paper, typography and design, traditional and experimental prints, innovative book structures, and collaborations with artists and poets, Turkey Press publications are collected in major museums and libraries. Its archives were purchased by the Getty Center in 1992. Recent exhibitions include diverse venues such as the Luis Angel Arango Library (Bogotá, Colombia), Deutsches Bucherei (Leipzig, Germany), Instituto de Artes Graficos (Oaxaca, Mexico), Santa Monica Museum of Art (Santa Monica, CA), Sun Valley Center for the Arts (Ketchum, Idaho), and Arts of the Book Collection (Yale University). He received his Master of Arts degree from Brown University.
Panelists
Michael Adamson
Adjunct Professor
Department of History
CSU Sacramento
Michael R. Adamson is adjunct professor of history at California State University, Sacramento, and an independent historical consultant. He has more than a decade of public history experience in the areas of business history, historic preservation, litigation support, oral history, and contract work for government agencies. His presentation at this conference is part of a larger study on the business career of Ralph B. Lloyd, a southern California oil man and commercial real estate developer in Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon.
David Cleveland
Professor
Environmental Studies Program
UC Santa Barbara
With student research assistants Ingrid R. Avison, Caitlin Brimm, Heidi Diaz, Sydney E. Hollingshead, Dominique C. Liuzzi, Nora M. Muller, Corie N. Radka, Tyler D. Watson, Hannah Wright.
The Santa Barbara County Agrifood Systems Research Group is an interdisciplinary UCSB team of nine undergraduates and professor David Cleveland (Environmental Studies). Undergraduates range from freshman to senior, with majors including Anthropology, Biological Sciences, Chemical Engineering, Environmental Studies, Global Studies, Political Science, Psychology, and Zoology. The goal of our research is to better understand our local agrifood system and engage the community in discussions about how to improve it. Cleveland is a human ecologist whose research and teaching focus on small-scale, sustainable agriculture, and has worked with farmers around the world, including in Ghana, Mexico, Zuni, Hopi, Pakistan. His research includes farmer and scientific knowledge and practice in plant breeding and crop genetic resources conservation, and the genetic, ecological and sociocultural impact of genetically engineered crop varieties. He is also researching local agrifood systems, diet and climate change, currently focusing on Santa Barbara County. He is a member of the Santa Barbara County Ag Futures Alliance, and is the UCSB Sustainability Champion for 2009-10.
Desiree D’Alessandro & Diran Lyons
Department of Art
UC Santa Barbara
Political Remix Video (PRV) artists Desiree D’Alessandro and Diran Lyons create transformative media artworks which challenge power structures through the reconfiguration of found mainstream media audiovisual material. Their recent work addresses political institutions, government policy, and environmental crises. D’Alessandro, an emerging artist currently in UCSB’s MFA program, and Lyons, a remix artist and UCSB alumnus, will discuss their participation in engaging social and cultural concerns with this artistic genre that is currently sweeping the internet.
D’Alessandro and Lyons have exhibited artworks nationally and internationally. D’Alessandro’s video works have been screened at venues such as the Rogue Film Festival, Fresno, Ca, Victoria Independent Film & Video Festival, British Columbia, Canada; Version 8 Festival 08, Chicago, IL; and the Festival of the Moving Image, Tampa, Fl. Lyons’ video works toured with The Audacity of Desperation exhibition, helped launch RemixAmerica.Org, screened at Open Video Conference at New York University, and were presented by artist/curator Jonathan McIntosh at Ars Electronica 2008 in Linz, Austria as part of the New Cultural Economy Symposium.
Jean-Paul deGuzman
Ph.D Candidate
United States History
UC Los Angeles
Jean-Paul deGuzman is a PhD student in US History, an affiliated graduate student with the Asian American Studies Center, and a research assistant in the Cesar E. Chavez Department of Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. JP’s research is on immigration, Los Angeles, urban and suburban history. His publications have appeared in Amerasia Journal, Adolescent Behavior Research Studies, and Learning English/Learning America: Voices of Latinos and Asian Americans.
Andrew D. Fitzpatrick
Interpretive Specialist
Ocotillo Wells State Vehicular Recreation Area
Andrew Fitzpatrick’s paper details his research into the lengthy oil exploration history of Ocotillo Wells, a California State Park. Andrew works in a naturalist and historian role for both California State Parks and the National Park Service. He studied frontier American history at the University of Minnesota and plans to pursue graduate degree in the field.
Linda Krop
Chief Counsel
Environmental Defense Center
Santa Barbara, CA
Linda Krop is the Chief Counsel at the Environmental Defense Center, a non-profit public interest environmental law firm headquartered in Santa Barbara, California. She has practiced environmental law at EDC since 1989 and specializes in cases dealing with coastal, open space and natural resource protection, as well offshore energy issues. For the last two decades, Linda and EDC have led the state-wide effort to curb oil and gas development off the California coast. In 2002 and 2005, Linda won court victories prohibiting the extension of 37 federal oil leases off the coast of Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties. In 2006, Linda led a team at EDC that successfully defeated a proposal to construct an offshore Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project near Oxnard and Malibu. Linda represents the Conservation community on the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Council and chairs the Sanctuary’s Conservation Working Group. In addition to her work at EDC, Linda teaches Environmental Law at UCSB.
David Maisel
Photographer & Multimedia Artist
San Francisco, CA
David Maisel is the recipient of a 2008 Artist Residency from the Headlands Center for the Arts and a 2007 Scholar/Artist Residency from the Getty Research Institute. He was nominated for the 2009 Alpert Award in the Visual Arts, and short-listed for the 2008 Prix Pictet Award. Maisel has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Opsis Foundation. His Library of Dust was the subject of a symposium in 2009 at the New York Institute for the Humanities. His works are in major public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Maisel’s first book, The Lake Project, was published by Nazraeli Press and selected as one of the Top 25 Photography Books of 2004 by the critic Vince Aletti. Nazraeli Press published Maisel’s second book, Oblivion, in 2006, and Cascade Effect in 2008. Chronicle Books published his monograph Library of Dust in 2008.
Eliza Martin
Department of History
UC Santa Cruz
Eliza Martin’s dissertation, “Growth by the Gallon: Water, Development and Power in San Diego, California” examines the social and environmental impacts of water infrastructure development in early twentieth century San Diego, California.
Vanessa Osborne
Department of English and Critical Theory
UC Irvine
Vanessa Osborne completed her Ph.D. in English and Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine in 2007. Her research interests include nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, film, media and advertising. She is currently employed as a lecturer in the General Education program in the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Southern California. She has recently taught courses on the environment in American literature and film and Los Angeles fiction and film. Recent publications include “Marx on the Mountain” in a forthcoming collection of essays entitled The Brokeback Book (University of Nebraska Press) and an essay on Sister Carrie, “The Logic of the Mannequin,” in The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800-2007.
Karen Piper
Visiting Research Professor
Humanities Center
Carnegie Mellon University
Karen Piper received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature Program at the University of Oregon in June of 1996. She is the author of Left in the Dust: How Race and Politics Created a Human and Environmental Tragedy in L.A. and Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race, and Identity. She is currently working on a book entitled A Girls Guide to Missiles.
Teresa Sabol Spezio
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of History
UC Davis
Teresa Sabol Spezio is currently working on her dissertation, Rising Tide: The Santa Barbara Oil Spill and Its Aftermath. She has a Masters degree in Environmental Studies, a Bachelors of Science in Chemical Engineering: she is the recipient of the National Science Foundation’s IGERT Fellowship.
Eric Smith
Professor
Department of Political Science
UC Santa Barbara
Professor Smith’s research focuses on environmental politics, public opinion, and elections. In the area of environmental politics, he has been examining public opinion toward offshore oil development, nuclear power, wind power, energy crises, and climate change. He recently finished a book about public opinion on energy and environmental issues, Energy, the Environment, and Public Opinion.
Third Rail
Los Angeles, CA
Third Rail is a collaborative group that anchors its activities in Los Angeles, CA. It is currently comprised of Bill Kelley, Jr., Caleb Waldorf, and Ken Rogers.
Bill Kelley, Jr. is a Los Angeles based educator, independent curator and theorist focusing on collaborative and public art practices. He received his Master’s degree in 19th Century Colonial Art Studies from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 2002. Caleb Waldorf is an artist currently living in Los Angeles, California. He is the co-editor of an online journal for short-form writing and media work called Version. He co-founded and was the Creative Director from 2007-2009 of the magazine, Triple Canopy, which in 2009 was a finalist for the National Magazine Awards (he is currently a Senior Editor). Kenneth Rogers is Assistant Professor in the Media and Cultural Studies Department at the University of California, Riverside. He has been a fellow at the Center for Ideas and Society at UC, Riverside; recipient of a Mellon grant on affect and interactive media; and has lectured at various venues, including the Getty Research Institute, The Kitchen, and New York University.
Mason White & Lola Shepard
Directors
InfraNet Lab
Toronto, Ontario
InfraNet Lab is a research collective probing the spatial byproducts of contemporary resource logistics. The laboratory posits the argument that a body of unique built works continues to arise out of the complex negotiation of, and competition for, biotic and abiotic resources. Operating in a manner similar to infrastructures, these works have evolved to merge landscape, urbanism, and architecture into a sophisticated mutant assemblage of surfaces, containers, and conduits.
David Zetland
S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow
Natural Resource Economics & Political Economy
UC Berkeley
David Zetland received his PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from UC Davis in 2008. He blogs on water, economics and politics at aguanomics.com