Texts of Repair

Critical Thinkers

              In 2024 the Ways of Repair : Loss and Damage commissioned three critical thinkers from the arts and humanities to explore different perspectives, aesthetic explorations, knowledges and lived experiences of the climate crisis in relation to Loss and Damage. The commissioned Texts of Repair from poet and writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs, interdisciplinary scholar Dr. Farhana Sultana and writer on contemporary art global politics, and ecology  T. J. Demos are intended to provide conceptual frameworks and critical links between the Loss and Damage discourse and themes already being widely explored within the arts and humanities in response to the combined climate, human rights, and environmental crisis, and the drive towards decolonization. Find the full bios of each critical thinker and a summary of their proposed Text of Repair below.


See the press release here.


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   Guided by the last works of the poet and environmentalist Audre Lorde, Alexis Pauline Gumbs has created a written ceremony in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl. In “Tell the Others”, Alexis meets us at the shoreline of loss, the swell of grief, the multi-life form convergence of disaster, with questions, offerings and provocations that support us in finding a collective way forward in the details of our survival.  

Read the full "Text of Repair" here.

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Image credit: Sufia Ikbal-Doucet
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings. Her work in this lifetime is to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice. Her poetic work in response to the needs of her cherished communities has held space for multitudes in mourning and movement. Alexis is the author of Survival Is a Promise : The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024)  Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020), Dub: Finding Ceremony (Duke University Press, 2020), M Archive: After the End of the World (Duke University Press, 2018), and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Duke University Press, 2016). Alexis is also the co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines (PM Press, 2016). Unlike most academic texts, Alexis’s work has inspired artists across form to create dance works, installation work, paintings, processionals, divination practices, operas, quilts and more. 

       In “Decolonizing Climate Knowledge: Repairing Epistemic Injustice and Loss in the Era of Climate Change”, Dr. Farhana Sultana draws on insights from various Global South and Indigenous scholars and argues for the urgent need to decolonize the institutions that govern climate science and policy. Highlighting the significant, yet often overlooked epistemic injustice of as a form of climate injustice, she calls for a fundamental rethinking of how climate knowledge is created, shared, and used, centering the voices and expertise of those who have been most affected by climate change but least empowered to shape its trajectory.

Read the full "Text of Repair" here.

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Image credit:
Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs
‍Dr. Farhana Sultana is an interdisciplinary scholar, speaker, and author who is broadly interested in nature-society relationships, political ecology, climate justice, water governance, critical development studies, transnational feminist scholarship, human rights and citizenship, and decolonizing global systems. She is a Professor of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University (US), where she is also Research Director for Environmental Collaboration and Conflicts in the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development at Independent University, Bangladesh. Recent publications include “Decolonizing Climate Coloniality" Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, (Haymarket Books, 2023), The Unbearable Heaviness of Climate Coloniality and Resplendent care-full climate revolutions (Political Geography, Volume 99, November 2022), and Water Politics: Governance, Justice, and the Right to Water. (Routledge, 2020).
       In “Gaza Genocide, Climate Colonialism, and Survival Media: What it would Mean to Repair Loss and Damage” T.J. Demos brings a critical analysis to Loss and Damage discourse by focusing on the aesthetics and politics of experimental artistic practices that connect harm and reparation to care and transformation in the context of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza with the intention of extending the horizon of flourishing ecological futurity beyond green capitalist solutionism.

Read the full "Text of Repair" here.

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Image credit: Center for Creative Ecologies
T. J. Demos is an award-winning writer on contemporary art, global politics, and ecology. He is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Founder and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely on the intersection of contemporary art, global politics, and ecology, and his essays have appeared in magazines, journals, and catalogues worldwide. His published work centres broadly on the conjunction of art and politics, examining the ability of artistic practice to invent innovative and experimental strategies that challenge dominant social, political, and economic conventions. Recent publications include the books Beyond the World’s End: Ecologies of Catastrophe, Just Futures, and Arts of Living at the Crossing (Duke University Press, 2020), Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017), Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016) and the essay Climate Control: From Emergency to Emergence (eflux, 2019).
       In addition to the artists research program Ways of Repair : Loss and Damage will commission critical thinkers from the arts and humanities to explore different perspectives, aesthetic explorations, knowledges and lived experiences of the climate crisis in relation to Loss and Damage. The commissioned texts are intended to provide conceptual frameworks and critical links between the Loss and Damage discourse and themes already being widely explored within the arts and humanities in response to the combined climate, human rights, and environmental crisis, and the drive towards decolonization.

       Please signup to our mailing list for updates on how to attend, the theme of the workshop, and what speakers will be present.

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For example, an art historian and cultural critic looking at how artists are already exploring solutions to the loss and damage caused by the climate crisis
For example, a writer probing the nature of national and personal identity in relation to climate induced displacement and the loss and damage caused by the climate crisis.
For example, a professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies exploring how Indigenous social thought can be engaged to create more fair and just loss and damage policy, more meaningful social movements, and robust approaches to decolonization.
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team please email:

info[@]waysofrepair.com

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Giulia Polenta.