The closing 2020 Building Publics meeting features "Climate Arts: Reading, Recycling, Making" by Akua Banful, a pedagogical project aimed at high school students that combined a curriculum of climate-oriented fiction with recycled and otherwise environmentally-engaged art. With this initiative, students gained a sense of the ways in which the arts can respond to our current climate predicament.

Akua Banful is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her dissertation, "The Hostile Tropics: Towards a Postcolonial Discourse of Climate," explores the interaction between imperialism and the representations of tropical nature and life in tropical climates in examples from anglophone, francophone, and lusophone literatures.