Prof. Robert Boschmann (Mount Royal University Calgary, Alberta Canada): "Agency and Gendered Spaces in Uranium City, Canada: A Visual Journey into Environmental Trauma"

Wednesday, 08.05.2019, 12:15-1:45 p.m., U9/01.11

Located on the north shore of Lake Athabasca, Uranium City was created as a model mid-twentieth-century westernized city in northern Canada by Eldorado Mining Inc., only to be abandoned in 1982. Its peak population of about 5,000 vacated the community, leaving today’s residual group of fifty to maintain whatever infrastructure and way of life they can. Using still and moving images gathered from two field trips to this remote place, Robert Boschman examined the roles and spaces of women between 1950 and 1982. There was special emphasis on the spatial legacies still to be found in the remains of this city, a Chernobyl without the meltdown, where human and nonhuman agencies are evident on the ground and in the water and air.

Robert Boschman is a professor in the Department of English, Languages, and Cultures at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta. He specializes in ecocritical approaches to American literature, with emphases on the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. He's published a number of books, including most recently On Active Grounds: Agency and Time in the Environmental Humanities (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2019). Robert Boschman is founder and co-convener of the award-winning Under Western Skies biennial conference series on the environment held at Mount Royal between 2010 and 2016 (http://skies.mtroyal.ca) as well as a past president of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC).