"Our book offers a new interpretation of the idea of scarcity in economic thought. We explain how modern economics arrived at its influential axiom of scarcity - infinite wants in a finite world - and also why this peculiar definition has no claim to universal validity. There are many other ways of imagining the relation between nature and the economy. We demonstrate the historical contingency of neoclassical scarcity by reconstructing the intellectual and environmental context of a dozen alternative conceptions of scarcity across 500 years of European thought. Our book ends with a plea for a new kind of economics oriented towards ecological repair rather than infinite growth."

This event is co-organized by the Center for International Social Science Research (CISSR) and the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU).

Science and liberalism appear to be bound more and more tightly as the crises of the present moment, from the pandemic to severe weather events, make painfully clear. This conference begins from the observation that liberalism and science have always been linked in ways that are both explicit and unspoken. At the same time that historical scholarship has laid bare the genealogies of liberalism in relation to colonialism, racism, and capitalism, science studies scholars and historians of science have revealed the many ways that science is produced and bounded by the social worlds it inhabits. In light of these critical traditions, we will bring together a diverse group of scholars to explore two related themes.

First, we will interrogate the ways “science” furnishes the liberal world with many of its key features, including for example individuality, diversity, autonomy/choice, and security. In other words, taking seriously the critical genealogies of liberalism that have emerged in recent years, we will examine the role of the sciences in that history of liberalism.

Second, we will attempt to make explicit the decidedly liberal contexts in which our fields have taken shape, with the aim of understanding how this context may have limited our collective understanding of the histories of science, technology and medicine. Our goal is to move past the idea that there is a single choice – either critique science rigorously but risk giving ammunition to illiberal forces or defend science as a part of liberal technocracy’s last gasping breaths. Both options serve liberalism. Maybe there are new ways to do critical scholarship on science.

Please visit the conference website↗ for full details.

This event is organized by the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge and co-sponsored by CEGU.

An exploration of the subaltern ecologies of the Enlightenment that explores the lost world of artisanal and peasant knowledge rivaling eighteenth-century political economy and natural history. Based on the forthcoming Les savoirs perdus de l'économie: contribution à l'équilibre du vivant, Gallimard, NRF essais.

Sponsored by the Department of History and CEGU

In this public dialogue, two of the leading social theorists of our time discuss the origins, manifestations and consequences of environmental crisis on our rapidly warming planet.

Over the last decade, political theorist Nancy Fraser and historical geographer Jason W. Moore have been among the most influential and systematic proponents of the claim that contemporary environmental emergencies are best understood in relation to—and as a direct expression of—capitalism’s underlying crisis-tendencies. On this understanding, the accumulation of capital is not simply a social or economic process that engenders damaging ecological effects. Rather, capital is itself a way of organizing nature, and thus environmental disasters such as global warming and biodiversity loss reflect its systematic devaluation or “cheapening” of the entire planetary web of life in both human and nonhuman forms. These operations are obscured, they argue, in dominant market-centric and technoscientific discourses, which treat nature as an exterior parameter or infinitely renewable resource supply for human consumption. In contrast, Fraser and Moore seek to draw attention to the “hidden abodes” of human and nonhuman reproductive work that support the operations of capital, and indeed, life itself on planet earth.

Moore and Fraser have been developing closely parallel lines of argument and discussing each other’s work for quite some time. In this conversation, moderated Professor Aaron Jakes of the Department of History, these eminent scholars will share the stage to consider what their respective approaches to an account of “capitalism’s natures” might offer to scholarship on the climate crisis, and to ongoing struggles to create more equitable, democratic, and livable ways of organizing our shared planetary existence.

Please note, this event will take place in person only. A recording will be made available shortly afterwards.

Please join us to celebrate Nancy Fraser’s recent book, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It (Verso Books, 2022). Fraser will be joined in conversation by CEGU faculty Ryan Cecil Jobson as interlocutor and Lisa Wedeen as moderator.

Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life–guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy.

What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital— and starve it to death.

This event is co-organized by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) and CEGU.

Please note, this event will take place in person only.

Jason W. Moore is an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, where he is professor of sociology and leads the World-Ecology Research Collective. He is author or editor, most recently, of Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), Capitalocene o Antropocene? (Ombre Corte, 2017), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (PM Press, 2016), and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press, 2017).

The organizers request that attendees read Jason Moore’s paper in advance. Click here to access the paper.

The burgeoning bottled water industry presents a paradox: Why do people choose expensive, environmentally destructive bottled water, rather than cheaper, sustainable, and more rigorously regulated tap water? The Profits of Distrust links citizens' choices about the water they drink to civic life more broadly, marshalling a rich variety of data on public opinion, consumer behavior, political participation, geography, and water quality. Basic services are the bedrock of democratic legitimacy. Failing, inequitable basic services cause citizen-consumers to abandon government in favor of commercial competitors. This vicious cycle of distrust undermines democracy while commercial firms reap the profits of distrust – disproportionately so from the poor and racial/ethnic minority communities. But the vicious cycle can also be virtuous: excellent basic services build trust in government and foster greater engagement between citizens and the state. Rebuilding confidence in American democracy starts with literally rebuilding the basic infrastructure that sustains life.

Please join CEGU for a discussion between co-author Manny Teodoro and CEGU Director of Academic Programs Sabina Shaikh for a conversation about the book at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore.

The historical geographies of extractivism and empire cut across the division between “Global North” and “Global South.” This roundtable brings together scholars working on the Russian and North American Arctic, Brazil, and Lebanon for a conversation across regions rarely placed in the same frame. We will trace the surprising parallels and uncanny connections between histories of energy extraction and ecological transformation on very different colonial and capitalist resource frontiers. We will explore, too, sources of hope: the nodes of resistance and alternative imaginaries generated by projects of Indigenous and decolonial worldmaking.

This session of the Environmental Studies Workshop is co-sponsored by the Urban Theory Lab and the Neubauer Collegium Project on Fossil Capitalism on the Global South.

Climate change is dramatically transforming the planet’s coastal terrains, rendering densely settled communities, vibrant ecosystems, and large-scale infrastructure vulnerable to an unprecedented range of threats. Insofar as coastlines typically constitute the borders of national states and their geopolitical operations, they are also at the core of planetary environmental, economic and societal transformations. From industrial ports, large-scale metropolitan regions and long-distance transportation corridors to coastal fishing villages, mudflats, wetlands, and marshes, coastlines represent multidimensional spaces of interface between heterogeneous ecologies and infrastructural configurations; national, regional and urban economies; multinational corporations; diverse forms of territorial governance; and regionally embedded circuits of social reproduction. These vital but delicate spaces are in peril.

How should we understand these transformations? What are their implications for inherited forms of social life, spatial organization, and territorial governance? What kinds of interventions might be imagined and mobilized to mitigate their effects not only upon coastlines, but upon the planet as a whole?

This panel brings together scholars from diverse fields—including urban planning, anthropology, sociology, landscape design, and architecture—whose work addresses emerging coastal vulnerabilities, transformations and crises in various sites around the world; their uneven social and spatial impacts; and emergent strategic responses. It will present an interdisciplinary conversation with the aim of generating new approaches to understanding—and shaping—the rapidly mutating environmental conditions of our time.

Following the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), UN secretary-general António Guterres declared that the earth “is on a fast track to climate disaster.” In order to avoid “tipping points that could lead to cascading and irreversible climate impacts,” secretary-general Guterres advocated an accelerated shift to renewable energy sources and a rapid downscaling of fossil fuel production and consumption. However, even as catastrophic floods, storms, heatwaves and fires proliferate across the planet, accompanied by devastating human suffering, population displacement, landscape destruction, and infrastructure damage, the fossil fuel industry remains globally dominant. While some governments seek to accelerate the transition to renewable energy and more sustainable social arrangements, many powerful states continue to subsidize fossil fuels and to grant permits for their continued exploration and extraction. Amidst these contradictory tendencies, climate activists and citizens around the world continue to develop strategies to protest the status quo, to pressure governments to limit or ban CO2-emitting machines, and to repair the massive social and environmental damage induced during the “long fossil boom” of the last 150 years.

Against the background of these intense transformations, crises and struggles, this panel of CEGU faculty considers the contribution of social science and humanities research to our ability to understand—and to shape—emergent environmental conditions, from the local to the planetary scales. The panel brings together scholars from diverse disciplinary locations—archeology, anthropology, economics, English, creative writing, geography, political ecology, philosophy, and public policy—to dialogue and debate about contemporary climate emergencies, their historical genealogies, their uneven geographies, their emergent dynamics, and their future implications. This event represents the first in a year-long series of discussions organized by CEGU to support research, teaching, and public dialogue about the social, historical, spatial and (geo)political dimensions of contemporary environmental transformations and crises.

People who have social and affective connections to a multiplicity of geographical locations, such as immigrants, are often portrayed as dwelling and being torn between places. In his recent book, The Diasporic Condition (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Ghassan Hage argues that this is not always the case; that rather than being torn between two or three places people are also capable of dwelling in all these places at the same time. One needs to pluralize one’s conception of what it means to dwell in and occupy a place, and the idea of inhabiting simultaneously a multiplicity of locations becomes easier to conceive. But to what extent do we all inhabit a multiplicity of realities? And if we do, what are the critical analytical consequences of approaching social existence in this way?

Ghassan Hage is professor of anthropology and social theory at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He is the author of several books, including White Nation, Against Paranoid Nationalism, After-Politics, and Is Racism an Environmental Threat?

Organized by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT); co-sponsored by the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, the Department of Anthropology, and CEGU 

Organized by the Program on the Global Environment and the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights; co-sponsored by CEGU

Organized by the Department of Sociology; co-sponsored by CEGU