2025-26 | These Toxic Times

Pesticides, PFAS chemicals, and unregulated industrial waste are certainly “toxic.” Masculinities, personalities, and workplaces are now often described the same way.

As a term, "toxic" identifies material threats to bodies and environments. Yet we now also regularly confer its metaphorical use on affective atmospheres and situations. The accelerating scope of toxicity's meaning suggests that its interpretation ultimately rests in conditions of power: the power to create and to violate as well as to maintain or repair breached borders.

As a multi-day conference, “These Toxic Times” will examine responses to environmental poisons alongside the multi-faceted effects of our metaphors. The aim of the scholars, artists and activists who will share their work isn’t to restore “toxicity” to any perceived unity or integrity of meaning, but to address the complications and politics, histories and practices surrounding the term “toxicity,” while drawing attention to the many ways we can, must—and do—live alongside the toxic in both ordinary and extraordinary encounters.

Tuesday, March 10 | 8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. | Conference Day 1
Student Union Landmark Room (210 SU)

Wednesday, March 11 | 10:00 a.m. - 6:30 p.m. | Conference Day 2
Locations: Student Union Landmark Room (210 SU) and Center for the Arts Screening Room (112 CFA)

Add-On Day: Thursday, March 12 | 9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. | Bus tour of Love Canal guided by Luella Kenny
Bus departs from the Center for the Arts loop. Space limited to the first 35 registrants.

Alexis Shotwell is a professor at Carleton University. Her academic work addresses impurity, environmental justice, racial formation, disability, unspeakable and unspoken knowledge, sexuality, gender, and political transformation.

Taking complicity and compromise as the constitutive and collective circumstances of our lives, rather than as things we can avoid, her current projects investigate how we might understand, bear witness, and respond to unjust histories and complex presents with an eye toward creating different futures.

Shotwell is currently writing and publishing on how speculative fiction connects with collective ecological movements and practices of direct democracy, with a manuscript in progress about Ursula K. Le Guin’s anarchist environmentalism. She is the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding (Penn State Press, 2011), Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (Minnesota University Press, 2016), and Liberation is Other People (Minnesota University Press, in production, forthcoming 2026).

Location: Student Union Landmark Room (210 Student Union) | Link to map

Join us as Media Study Professor John Fiege interviews Mike Schade of Toxic-Free Future live on-stage for the Chrysalis podcast. In this wide-ranging conversation, they will explore Mike’s experiences over decades campaigning to reduce plastics and eliminate toxic chemicals including PFAS. Fiege and Schade will discuss working for a toxic-free world now and in the future. They will consider what role students can play in securing a healthier tomorrow.

Presented in partnership with the Humanities Institute Spring Conference “These Toxic Times,” this event is part of the University at Buffalo Archives exhibition and programming series on Love Canal and environmental justice.

This event will include a pre-interview reception in the Center for the Arts atrium beginning at 3:30 p.m.

Location: Center for the Arts Screening Room (112 CFA)

Join us for a bus tour of the Love Canal neighborhood with activist Luella Kenny. The bus will depart from the Center for the Arts loop at 9:00 a.m. and return to the same location by 1:00 p.m.

Luella Kenny is a native Western New Yorker, born in Niagara Falls.  She graduated from Niagara University and worked as a research scientist at Roswell Park studying chemotherapeutic agents.  Amidst the Love Canal crisis, Luella’s son Jon died in 1978 at the age of 7, after repeated hospitalizations but no diagnosis. Luella’s demand for answers was met with lies and gaslighting. Since those events, Kenny has been an environmental activist, speaking to students, community groups and book clubs, especially since the publication of Keith O’Brien’s Paradise Falls. Her guiding principle in this work is for no other child to die of corporate and government irresponsibility.

On view, reproductions of selected works from Life: a work on progress

Lead Poisoning, Life: a work on progress [original: Giclee photographs on cotton, 40” x 60”, 2024]

Toxic, Life: a work on progress [original: Giclee on cotton, 26.6” x 40”, 2020] 

On view, reproductions of selected works from the Toxic Archives series, part of the Operation Sunshine, 2013 - 2017.

"Joan Linder: Operation Sunshine presents meticulously hand-drawn replicas of archival documents...[t]aken together, these deftly rendered images faithfully record the passing of time, subtly calling into question the authenticity of information. With each incidental mark and imperfection, Linder’s hand is evident. Her ardent observations create a poignant, collective memory that bears witness to the improbability and travesty of historical events."

(Excerpt from the Joan Linder: Operation Sunshine catalogue, Holly Hughes Bohner, Godin-Spaulding Curator & Curator for the Collection, Buffalo AKG Museum, 2016.)