May 4

History Forum: Dr. Emily O’Gorman

Bird Migration, Wetlands, and Global Environmental Crisis
Dr. Emily O’Gorman, Department of Geography & Planning, Macquarie University
Friday, May 4, 10:00 – 11:30 a.m.
Sakamaki Hall A201
2530 Dole Street, UH Mānoa

In this talk, Dr. O’Gorman, Senior Lecturer in Department of Geography and Planning at Macquarie University, will present a genealogy of wetlands to show how they have been shaped by understandings of bird migration and an emerging sense of a global environmental crises in the 1960s and 1970s.

O’Gorman situates her discussion in Australia, where changing outlooks on transcontinental bird migrations, Pacific diplomacy, and ideas of habitats and habitat loss, converged to shape government scientists’ involvement in the Ramsar Convention of Wetlands of International Importance 1971.

By exploring wetlands as sites defined by and laden with specific sets of values, shaped in turn by particular forms of expertise and relationships with animals and plants, O’Gorman demonstrates wetlands’ identities within human and more-than-human Australasian and Pacific circulations.

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Emily O’Gorman is an environmental historian with interdisciplinary research interests within the environmental humanities. Her research is primarily concerned with contested knowledges within broader cultural framings of authority, expertise, and landscapes.

Talk sponsored by the History Forum, UH Mānoa Department of History. For further information, please contact the UH Mānoa History Department at 956-8486 / https://manoa.hawaii.edu/history/

Before you migrate away from campus for the summer, come to this talk!