In Beyond the World's End, a talk drawing from his latest book, Beyond the World's End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (2020), T. J. Demos will explore cultural practices that provide radical propositions for living in a world beset by environmental and political crises. Rethinking relationships between aesthetics and an expanded political ecology that foregrounds just futurity, Demos examines how contemporary artists are diversely addressing urgent themes, including the entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats, the visual politics of climate refugees, art that responds to resource extraction and that evokes Afrofuturist climate justice and multispecies ecologies. Throughout, Demos contends that contemporary intersections of aesthetics and politics, as exemplified in the Indigenous uprising of Standing Rock’s #NoDAPL, are creating the imaginaries that will be crucial to building a socially just and flourishing future.

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 founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He researches the intersection of visual culture, radical politics, and political ecology—particularly where they oppose racial and colonial capitalism—and is the author of several books, including Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (Duke, 2020); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology (Sternberg, 2016); and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today, (Sternberg, 2017). He co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-21). He is presently working on a new book on radical futurisms.