Join Thought Leaders and Activists for Equitable Dinners: Thriving Together
Are you ready to be part of an extraordinary gathering that brings together thought leaders, activists, performers, authors, and academics for thought-provoking, late-night discussions on pressing global issues? Look no further, as this year’s Equitable Dinners, a key event during Night of Ideas, will delve into the critical topic of food justice and equity.
As part of Night of Ideas, sign up for one of three garden tours.
Tour 1: Swan Woods: Landscape History and Ecology of the Remnants of the Atlanta Piedmont Forest. Discover the history and ecology of Swan Woods, which is a part of the Piedmont forest in the heart of Buckhead. Read more.
Tour 2: The Entrance Gardens. The Entrance Gardens spread across the 8-acre frontage of the Atlanta History Center. Over 80% of the 8-acre space is planted with flora native to Georgia, and managed in a way to create abundant habitat and food sources for native pollinators. Read more.
Tour 3: Special Treasures Tour of the Cherokee Garden Library. This tour will highlight the diverse and meaningful stories of the people and plants that have shaped, are shaping, and will shape our land in Atlanta and beyond. Whether it’s an old postcard of Ansley Park or a rare 18th-century volume, the library is full of surprises. Read more.
The Purple Coneflower Echinacea is a plant native to most of the United States. It has been used historically by Native American tribes to ward off negative energy, promote good health, and enhance spiritual growth. Now, we know that this powerful plant can improve blood sugar, anxiety inflammation, skin health and also has anti-cancer properties. This plant is also extremely important to the natural landscape due to its ability to attract pollinators. As we move into the future, and people have increasingly been drawn to natural healing, the Purple Coneflower Echinacea will continue to be a very important and valuable plant to the human race and our natural environment.
Whether climate change is your number one passion or you are new to the subject, test your knowledge and learn more in a fun and friendly way. Guided by a facilitator, participants guess hidden cards from the collage to obtain a broad overview of the causes and consequences of climate change, based on IPCC reports. This 20-minute introduction is the simplified and incomplete version of the 3-hour Climate Fresk. The workshop has become the reference tool to enable individuals, schools, and organizations to take ownership of the challenge of climate change. Already 1.4 million participants have taken part in a Climate Fresk workshop worldwide!
Throughout the evening, experience the electrifying beats of DJ Salah Ananse. With over 20 years in Atlanta’s music scene, he’s shared stages with legends like Rich Medina and DJ Spinna. From soul to hip hop, Salah Ananse takes you on a unique journey in which genres are blended seamlessly.
Night of Ideas opening conversation with photographic artist Sheila Pree Bright, urban planner Ryan Gravel and journalist Rose Scott, based on Sheila Pree Bright’s trilogy on Southern landscapes, Invisible Empire, Behold the Land, and Land of Blood and Dirt and Ryan Gravel’s forthcoming book, American Land.
“During the turbulent times of the pandemic, I found my soul was profoundly touched by the uncertainty that loomed in the air. The essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, Invisible Empire and Behold the Land, guided me towards the Southern landscapes, bearing my ancestors’ generational trauma for me to re-imagine a place of rebirth for the future” (Sheila Pree Bright).
“In any corner of this richly diverse country, it is our land, not our ancestry, that binds our people together. American landscapes have always been redesigned to shape, connect, and divide our lives – and our understanding of ourselves. They are never neutral. Our work to repair them is the first step in a meaningful recovery. It forces us to reckon with the myths our nation was founded on, making our land more than a mere reflection of our highest ideals. It is the political strategy we need to achieve them” (Ryan Gravel).
This first conversation in the Cox Room will explore the intersection of technology, research, and data in driving smart cities. We’ll dive into innovative strategies for energy efficiency, discuss the role of smart technology in resource management, and examine the policies that make cities not only smarter but greener and more livable. But we will also look at the larger environmental and ethical consequences of a place created through the exploitation of resources found in other parts of the world. In order for smart cities to be truly sustainable, we must reconcile how a participative democracy on a local scale can work together with better ethics on a global scale and continue improve the quality of life for residents. This discussion brings together two specialists in these subjects, Debra Lam, Founding Executive Director for Partnership for Inclusive Innovation and French journalist Guillaume Pitron, author of The Dark Cloud, an exploration of the environmental consequences of the digital world, translated into several languages. This conversation will be moderated by Pauline Boulay, Deputy Attaché for the Office of Science and Technology of the French Embassy in the United States.
What does Atlanta’s future look like with Mvskoke people in it? This conversation concerns the Mvskoke people—the land’s original inhabitants—and what is at stake for envisioning Mvskoke futurity in their homelands. An Indigenous futurity conceptual framework guides the conversation. The wayfinding tools are (1) Radical Sovereignty/Vnokeckv, (2) Indigenous Community Knowledge, (3) Collective Power, and (4) Mvskoke Emergence Geographies (conceptualizations of land and space grounded in Mvskoke worldviews). We invite dialogue that grapples with Mvskoke ideals and people—the first step towards growing a relationship and respecting Mvskoke relationships to the land and everything on, above, and below it.
The poet and the comedian. Throughout history, there’s perhaps no greater way to convey both simple and complex truths than through laughter and lyrics. Whether through song, poem, or bit, these artistic expressions have a way of healing and revealing. It’s fitting then that on a Night of Ideas, the evening will be woven together by a thread of insightful and interactive interludes grounded in the artistic disciplines of comedy and spoken word. What does it mean to be firmly rooted in red clay and yet reach for the stars?
Riffing on this year’s theme of “Behold the Land,” Adán Bean and David Perdue will be joined by heralded comedians Mark Kendall and Storhm Artiste, as well as phenomenal poets Amena Brown and Ryan J. Helping guide the audiences through the evening of enlightening conversations, presentations, and discussions, these Southern storytellers will share hilarious and poignant perspectives, poems, and reflections that invite us, as the African revolutionary Thomas Sankara once said, to invent the future.
Visual artist Rachel Parish and poet Tiphanie Yanique will be sharing eco-poetic perspectives through screening, reading, and an ensuing conversation moderated by the spoken word poet, emcee, and storyteller, Adán Bean.
A video essay by Rachel Parish — Throughout 2022, Rachel Parish embarked on a process to create a series of monuments to the headwaters of the four springs and creeks that lie beneath downtown Atlanta and feed our region’s rivers. Out of this, she created Emergence, a series of sculptures, live performances, and sound and video installations. This video essay follows the flow of her emergent relationship with the waters as she did so.
A reading by Tiphanie Yanique — Tiphanie Yanique will give a reading and talk from her book Land of Love and Drowning, a finalist for the Orion Prize in Environmental Literature, and winner of the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction. Land of Love and Drowning challenges ideas of tourism and colonialism while asking us to consider the tension between environmental beauty and social justice.
In the context of climate uncertainty, and as Metro Atlanta is expected to grow to nearly 8 million residents by 2050, what kind of urbanism should we promote? Should we continue to move towards an increasingly urban world, more and more concentrated in large metropolises, to address environmental crisis and urban sprawl? Or should we promote a new model of relations between cities and the countryside to cultivate more resilient and self-sustaining life-places? This conversation brings together French historian of architecture and environment Sébastien Marot, and Dr. Lelani Mannetti, a researcher in urban futures at Georgia State University. A conversation moderated by Darin Givens, co-founder of the nonprofit organization for pedestrian advocacy ThreadATL.
Prominent among the “flat failures of white civilization” are devastations of skies, soils, and waters rendered by a world system of mounting inequalities founded on colonialism, plantations, and bondage, everywhere to this day reverberating with structural violence to secure settler white supremacy. Environmental Health Scientist Na’Taki Osborne Jelks and Nature-Society Geographer Richard Milligan discuss the saturation of this land with race, and dream of dismantling the whiteness embedded in practices of environmental governance that sustain environmental injustice. How does whiteness shape the ways their environments are envisioned, (de)valued, measured, and governed? How can folks betray the whiteness of the land to become “fellow travelers toward the dawn” of environmental justice?
Cross the threshold to this performed interview that introduces us to the art practice of poet, singer, rapper, visual artist T.I.E. By way of Paris, this Senegalese artist will be in conversation with theatre director, performer and cultural arts custodian Aku Kadogo. Riffing on the feminine frequency of T.I.E art practice the conversation will weave in tassu (rhythmic, chant like poetry in Senegalese tradition) movement , spoken word and ritual.
With global temperatures rising by an average of 1.5 degrees Celsius in 2023, how are major cities preparing for the effects of climate change? What are the consequences in Atlanta and other American metropolises? What environmental and climate policies are being implemented to promote more equitable cities, in harmony with nature and their inhabitants? This conversation brings together Chandra Farley, Chief Sustainability Officer for the City of Atlanta, and environmental policy leader Mark Chambers, previously the Director of Sustainability for both New York City and the District of Columbia.
This conversation will be moderated by David Perdue.
This conversation brings together Atlanta-based cultural producer Floyd Hall and Chicago-based author and filmmaker Ytasha Womack.
As populations migrate throughout Atlanta’s neighborhood geography, hyperlocal communities experience shifts in identity and agency, even as the broader identity of the city may remain unchanged. Floyd Hall will discuss the multiple Atlantas—the “Atlanta Multiverse”—and how new and legacy communities are grappling with the effects of what changing populations mean to the land, language, and locations of a people.
For Ytasha L. Womack, we can consider “Land as Synergy”, in an Afrofuturist perspective. We are intersections of our personal histories and futures, along with decisions and geopolitical dynamics that bring us to the lands and neighborhoods we call home. What does it look like to think about the spaces we occupy as being synergetic points of histories and futures? How does it change our relationship to space? Ytasha L. Womack will explore cultural relationships to space and time through the lens of Afrofuturism, engaging with what land, migration, and community mean in times that highlight the digital and virtual.
Join Hannah Palmer for this ranger-led introduction to the newly established Department of Urban Springs. The Department is a state-level government agency that was created in 2024 to protect and promote the lifegiving “waters of the state” as defined by Georgia’s state constitution. Atlanta’s abundant “mineral springs” once formed the centerpiece of health resorts and pleasure spots. During the 20th Century, most were routed into underground pipes. But Atlanta’s natural springs are still crucial–for pleasure, recreation, worship, cultural identity, and for justice. Palmer explains how, in an increasingly hot climate, our urban springs are a precious resource to make Atlanta greener, kinder, cooler, more resilient, and equitable.
T.I.E, a Senegalese artist rooted in Afro-eco-feminist vision, and Reverence, an Atlanta-based collective known for their genre-blurring couture sounds, have joined forces in a groundbreaking collaboration. At the heart of their collaboration lies a shared commitment to social and environmental justice: T.I.E’s Afro-eco-feminist perspective infuses her music and art with themes of empowerment and interconnectedness with the natural world. Reverence brings a unique blend of musical genres – jazz, hip-hop, and electronic, to create a captivating auditory experience.