2026 Symposium
Environmental Humanities Research Center
Energy, Environment, and Infrastructure
May 15th & 16th, 2026, HG 1010
Friday 5/15
Humanities Gateway 1010
Panel, 11:30-3:00pm (Poetics and Politics of Energy Infrastructure)
1. Jon L. Pitt (UCI) - "Subatomic Infrastructures: Kamiokande and The Post-Nuclear Legacy of Frederick Reines"
2. Wendy Wenxin Zhang (UCI) - "Digital Enclosure: Tanka People and Smart Fishing Port in the Pearl River Delta"
3. James Nisbet (UCI) - "Counter-Camouflage: Long Beach's Oil Islands"
Short Film Screenings 3:30-5:30 p.m
McCormick Screening Room
Eme Cosmos (23 mins) and Amber (9 mins) with Live Virtual Introduction and Q&A with Director Mia Yu
Saturday 5/16
Humanities Gateway 1010
Panel 1, 10:00-12:00pm (Infrastructures of Extraction, Excretion, and Pollution in Asia)
1. Abigail Xue Ma (UCI) - "Ecologies of Credit: Landscape, Energy Security, and Speculation of Green Future in China"
2. Jake Atienza (UCI) - "More Than a Dent in the Landscape: Cebu as a Multi-sited Text of Extractivism"
3. Jungha Hwang (UCI) - "Not a Rupture but an Incremental Reconfiguration: Human Waste Composting Plants as Transitional Infrastructure in 1960s-70s Seoul"
4. Carrie Jiang (UCSB) - "Deodorizing the City: River Pollution and Infrastructural Risk in Postsocialist China"
Panel 2, 1:30-3:30 pm (Urban Infrastructure & Rethinking the "Built" Environment)
1. Charlie Squire (UCSB) - "Bildungsgerman: Torstraße 1 and the Construction of a Berlinische Heterotopia"
2. Zina Giannopoulou (UCI) - "Homeless Worlding as Political Resistance in Marc Singer's Dark Days"
3. Yuki Nagamine (UCLA) - "Materiality and Technopolitics of Urban Infrastructures: Wim Wender's Perfect Days"
4. Alexandra Petrus (USC) - "Building Otherwise: Terra Nil and the Limits of Ecogames and Ecocriticism"
Panel 3, 4:00-6:00 pm (Atmosphere, Landscape, and Infrastructure in the Arts of Southern California)
1. Erin Cooney (UCLA) - Screening of Aire Libre (32 mins) with Introduction
2. Michaela Morhmann (UCI Langson Orange County Museum of Art) - Presentation on "Breakdown/Breakthrough" Exhibition
3. Talin Abadian (UCI) - "Disrupting Infrastructure, Redefining Landscape: 'Sleeping Figure' reimagines Place"
Organized by
UC Irvine Environmental Humanities Research Center
Co-sponsored by
UC Irvine East Asian Studies
UC Irvine Film and Media Studies
UCI Japanese Studies Research Cluster
