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2026 SPE Annual Conference: Catalyst for Exchange

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Climate Resilience in the American South

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

Thursday, March 19 - 2:00PM to 4:00PM
Georgia 6

This panel will bring together artists and researchers whose creative work seeks to investigate climate adaptation and mitigation in the American south. 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.