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Conflict, Environmental Disaster and their Aftermath: Repairing Our Broken World through Art
  • ISSN: 1743-5234
  • E-ISSN: 2040-090X

Abstract

In March 2023 in Little Rock, Arkansas, my family’s home was destroyed by a tornado. Around that same time in North America, natural disasters seemed common: catastrophic flooding in Vermont, tornadoes throughout the South and Midwest, expansive wildfires in Canada. Environmental disaster has become part of the global human experience. In this visual essay, I revisit the shattering of my own illusions of material stability through prose and photographic images that were produced around the time of the tornado by myself and my children. The prose is written from a second-person perspective, inspired by Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s (2015) essay ‘Now let us shift… conocimiento… inner work, public acts’, to invite the reader into a sense of shared vulnerability. I make connections between these forms of artmaking and concepts of ontological, systemic and material vulnerability. I attempt to show that all material bodies have a shared vulnerability and encourage art educators to embrace this vulnerability within artmaking practices.

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/content/journals/10.1386/eta_00189_3
2025-02-19
2025-06-15
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References

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