Professor Allen Springer will explore how contemporary international institutions are responding to the challenges posed by a wave of populist and nationalist sentiment, which often challenges the relevance of the institutions themselves. How do institutions operating in such diverse arenas as security, humanitarian, and environmental policy absorb and adapt to these pressures and attempt to confront effectively issues ranging from major transboundary movements of people seeking political asylum to global climate change?

Springer is a scholar of international environmental law and policy, focusing on issues of multilateral environmental governance, particularly in a North American context. He is the author of The International Law of Pollution: Protecting the Global Environment in a World of Sovereign States, and Cases of Conflict: Transboundary Disputes and the Development of International Environmental Law. A graduate of Amherst College and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Springer joined the Bowdoin faculty in 1976, serving as Bowdoin’s Dean of Students from 1980-82 and chairing the department of government and legal studies on several occasions. Springer delivered the Karofsky Faculty Encore Lecture in 2002, and in 2006 received the Bowdoin Alumni Council Award for Faculty and Staff.

William Nelson Cromwell, a successful and nationally respected New York lawyer, established the professorship which bears his name as a gesture of admiration for the College which produced many of the men who worked for and with his law firm. Born in 1854, Cromwell rose quickly to prominence in the world of legal affairs in New York. The William Nelson Cromwell Chair was provided for in his estate upon his death in 1948. It is Bowdoin’s only chair designed essentially for prelaw study.

Free and open to the public.

How might “thinking like an aquifer” help challenge the conjoined crises of ecologies, democracies and hermeneutics that define the contemporary? To explore this question, this lecture offers an experimental ethnographic account of aquifer depletion on the U.S. Great Plains. Combining visual and textual imagery, it charts how depletion accretes over generations to become a porous threshold of belonging indistinguishable from partisan and epistemic divides. In doing so, it offers a wider reflection on the ways auto-ethnography of settler legacies may illuminate anti-essentialist approaches to the social worlds emerging along frontiers of destruction and change.

Lucas Bessire is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma whose work addresses extraction, power, and genre. He is the author of Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and creator of the Ayoreo Video Project (2017). He is currently a Fellow at the Radcliffe Insitute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.  During his time at Radcliffe, Bessire is completing an auto-ethnographic account of aquifer depletion on the High Plains. The book project charts how people inhabit the imminent ends of groundwater in order to reflect more broadly on the defining conundrums of our political present and the potential of ethnography to cross divides.

Bessire is the recipient of various awards and fellowships, including from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Science Foundation, the Reed Foundation, the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He earned a certificate in documentary filmmaking and a PhD in anthropology from New York University.

Sponsored by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and the Earth and Oceanographic Science, Environmental Studies, and Latin American Studies Programs.