The Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU) is a proposal currently under development by a faculty working group at the University of Chicago. Based in the Division of Social Sciences, CEGU is envisioned as a robust interdisciplinary platform for critical thinking, advanced research, and innovative pedagogy on the societal and spatial dimensions of climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental transformation. Its faculty and students will seek to investigate and respond to the environmental crises of our time not only by advancing climate change awareness and environmental literacy, but by actively centering questions about climate change and socio-environmental interdependencies in the epistemologies, conceptual frameworks, analytic methods, data sources, and normative foundations of social research at large.
This preliminary website is a repository of information and announcements regarding the ongoing activities of the working group. A full website will be developed in the coming months pending CEGU's formal approval and launch as an academic unit at the University of Chicago.
In winter and spring 2022, the CEGU faculty working group has organized a series of panel discussions dealing with some of the central issues we hope to explore in our future work. We are also co-sponsoring several additional events on closely allied issues, which are detailed below.
CEGU Event
Thursday, February 10, 2022
4:30–6:00pm CT
Zoom
Sunil Amrith
Yale University
Keston Perry
Williams College
Elizabeth Chatterjee
University of Chicago
(moderator)
CEGU Event
Thursday, February 24, 2022
4:30–6:00pm CT
Zoom
Thea Riofrancos
Providence College
Julie Klinger
University of Delaware
Ryan Cecil Jobson
University of Chicago
(moderator)
CEGU Event
Thursday, April 21, 2022
4:30–6:00pm CT
Zoom
Alyssa Battistoni
Barnard College
Megan Black
MIT
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson & Lisa Wedeen
University of Chicago
(moderators)
CEGU Event
Friday, April 29, 2022
12:30–2:00pm CT
Zoom
Matthew Gandy
University of Cambridge
Mindi Schneider
Wageningen University
Neil Brenner & Victoria Saramago
University of Chicago
(moderators)
Co-sponsored Event: Sociology Department Colloquium
Wednesday, March 2, 2022, 12:30–1:50pm CT, Zoom
Hannah Holleman
Amherst College
Organized by the Sociology Department; Co-sponsored by the Urban Theory Lab and the Faculty Working Group for the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU)
Co-sponsored Event: Frizzell Learning & Speaker Series
Thursday, March 3, 2022, 5:00–6:30pm CT, Zoom
Ananya Roy
UCLA
Organized by the Program on the Global Environment and the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights; co-sponsored by the Faculty Working Group for the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU)
Co-sponsored Event: Nicholson Faculty Lecture
Tuesday, March 29, 2022, 5:00pm CT
Zoom
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
University of Chicago
Dipesh Chakrabarty
University of Chicago
(moderator)
Organized by the Nicholson Center for British Studies; co-sponsored by the Faculty Working Group for the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU)
Co-sponsored Event: Theorizing the Present
Wednesday, March 30, 2022, 5:00pm CT
SSRB Tea Room & Zoom (hybrid event)
Ghassan Hage
University of Melbourne
Organized by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT); co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, and the Faculty Working Group for the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU)
If you require accommodations to attend any of these events, please contact us.