Donate

Your contribution ensures the continuation of our vital community, its programs, and initiatives.

2026 SPE Annual Conference: Catalyst for Exchange

Looking for a chapter event?

Past SPE Annual Conferences

resources

opportunities

news

events

exhibitions

SPE Events

2026 SPE Annual Conference Schedule

print this page

« back to conference schedule

Climate Resilience in the American South

Jeremy Bolen & Allison Grant : Beate Geissler, Oliver Sann, Marni Shindleman

Thursday, March 19 - 2:00PM to 4:00PM
Valdosta

This panel will bring together artists and researchers whose creative work seeks to investigate climate adaptation and mitigation in the American south and beyond. The region has been shaped by fossil fuel production, slavery and enduring inequities, cancer-causing industries, and natural disasters, but also grass-roots organizing, protest, community resilience, and, increasingly, shifting practices around energy production and use. Many artists are wrestling with what it means to create from within these layered histories and ongoing crises, bringing forward new understandings of how people inhabit place, ecology, and time—past, present, and future. How can we cultivate communities, cultures, and civic structures that are less anthropocentric, working together toward a sustainable and equitable path forward? How do we, as Nate Hagens puts it, bend but not break. This panel seeks artists, writers, activists, and others engaged in place-based creative practices that center reciprocity, environmental justice, and community building through regionally specific creative practice.

This panel of artists, educators, and researchers will focus on a wide array of artistic and educational practices, including high-frequency trading, ICE detention centers, plant-based photographic methods, geo-engineering, the impacts of the fossil fuel industry on Southern communities and the relationship between economic growth and energy production.