Second year Anthropology Ph.D. student, Ashley J. May, was one of ten students from Brown and Duke selected to participate in the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown 2025 Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness Summer Workshop. This year’s workshop, “In the Dissolution,” seeks to address climate change and its accompanying disasters as co-constitutive outcomes of the ongoing project of racial capital and toxic modernity. Climate change is inextricably bound to material and epistemological violences produced by Western colonial powers’ global conquest, African enslavement, and Indigenous dispossession. Land, territories, communities, and the human and more-than-human ecologies have been casualties of this enterprise and need therefore to be studied in their varied articulations, planetary relationalities, and “deep implicancy” (Ferreira da Silva). “In the Dissolution” will be directed by Macarena Gómez-Barris (Brown University) and Michaeline Crichlow (Duke University) alongside core faculty members such as Denise Ferreira da Silva (New York University), Jayna Brown (Brown), and Alexander Weheliye (Brown).

Ashley will be workshopping her ongoing project, “May God Keep Us Close,” which traces the spatial histories of Dirree Sheikh Hussein, a sacred landscape in the Bale zone of southeastern Ethiopia, charting the regimes of empire, insurgency, and catastrophe that have taken place from 1896 to the present. Additionally, she will design and lead a seminar tentatively titled “The Limits of Visuality” based on her growing body of work in the mode of film collage as a visual/poetic reorientation of Black life that engages themes of dispersal, plot, field, time, sediment, return, and suture.

Learn more about the 2025 Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness Summer Workshop