Description:

Please join us on Friday November 22nd at 1pm for a conversation with Michael Watts. Michael Watts is a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and current visiting professor, Committee of Environment, Geography and Urbanization, University of Chicago. Professor Watts will walk us through some of his intellectual biography, including lessons learned. He has recently returned from a trip to Abuja and the Niger Delta where he took part in the launch of a multiyear commission assessing the impact of the oil and gas industry. (The report can be found here: https://www.bayelsacommission.org.) His groundbreaking books include, Silent Violence: Food, Famine, and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria (1983), Reworking Modernity: Capitalisms and Symbolic Discontent (1992, with Allan Pred), Liberation Ecologies (1996, with Richard Peet), The Curse of Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta (2008, with photojournalist Ed Kashi), and Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas (2015, with Hannah Appel and Arthur Mason).