Just Art Lecture

Just Art Lecture

The Just Art Lectures are part of the Just Art Project which aims to create common grounds for climate justice through artistic research. The first lecture, A Geoanthropology of Studio Glass, is presented by Erin O’Connor. It takes place in collaboration with the University of Groningen, Groninger Museum, ERC Facere, and Minerva Art Academy. 

Abstract
A Geoanthropology of Studio Glass offers an account of studio glass that integrates the human experience of self-determination and creativity with the living (and dying) ecological world. 

Methodologically, this employs ethnogeology, a qualitative research method combining ethnography (the mapping of social interactions, material culture, and systems of social relations) and geology (the study of the earth) to show how a people, or ethnos (glassblowers), become with the geo (earth) in the interrelated dynamics of making and resource extraction. 

Theorizing at the geo-bio interstices of becoming a studio glassblower, this constitutes a symgeological account. Akin to the human-bio co-becoming designated by the term “symbiotic”, “symgeologic” explores human-geo co-becoming, shifting studies of the glass from discrete objects to animate litographic materiality.

About Erin E. O’Connor
Erin E. O’Connor is an internationally recognized expert in craft studies and Associate Professor of Sociology at Marymount Manhattan College, New York City. Her research specializes in glass, the arts, knowledge, materiality, embodiment, and the environment. 

Her monograph, Fire-Craft: Art, Body, and World among Glassblowers (Columbia University Press, 2025) explores the human condition through the embodied and material dynamics of becoming a studio glassblower. 
In 2023, she received the Rakow Grant for Glass Research at the Corning Museum of Glass, launching her current book project, The Middle Mineral & the Mine: An Ethnogeology of Studio Glass. This research follows the intersecting threads of the art’s medium, revealing the material life of mines, minerals, and the deep time of geology.