Kent State East Liverpool is preparing for its annual Environmental Justice Conference to be held April 22, beginning at 8 a.m. in the Slak Shak in Purinton Hall.
The day-long conference includes student paper sessions, online presentations and poster presentations that showcase student research, as well as guest speakers. It is free and the public is invited.
This year’s speakers include Dr. Babacar M'Baye, Barton Paul Levenson and Kyle Barron.
M'Baye is the keynote speaker and his presentation is “Theorizing Environmental Injustice through the Prisms of Racism and Colonialism.” He is an associate professor of English and Pan-African studies at Kent State University and the author of numerous articles published in academic journals, as well as two books, including The Trickster Comes West: Pan-African Influence in Early Black Diasporan Narratives and Black Cosmopolitanism and Anticolonialism: Pivotal Moments. M'Baye received his doctorate degree in American culture studies from Bowling Green State University.
Levenson is a physicist and science fiction/fantasy writer from Pittsburgh. He follows a long tradition of the interconnection of science fiction to developments in science and environmental conditions that affect life. Because of concerns of drought and flooding, as well as dwindling numbers of available seed types, Levenson’s talk is “Global Warming and Crop Failure,” focusing on food production.
He has written articles for physics journals and published more than 70 short stories, essays and poems, as well as a nonfiction publication, "The Greenhouse Effect--What It Is, How It Works." Of his seven published novels, two are still in print: The Celibate Succubus and Dark Gods of Alter Telluria.
Barron is a technical writer at Diebold Corp. and a senior English major at Kent State, enrolled in the Honors College. Originally from Oregon, he has long been an advocate for the environment and the poetry in his thesis moves across the country, examining environments and environmental justice concerns nationally. He received the coveted Assessment with Distinction for his thesis.
For information about the conference, or details for submitting a paper, poster or online presentation, contact Dr. Lydia Rose at lrose17@kent.edu or visit www.kent.edu/columbiana.
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