Environmental Emergencies, Emergent Environments
Critical Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Inaugural Conference, Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU)
Division of Social Sciences, The University of Chicago
April 20–21, 2023
Environmental Emergencies,
Emergent Environments
Critical Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Inaugural Conference, Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU)
Division of Social Sciences, The University of Chicago
April 20–21, 2023
Calvin & Freda Redekop Lectures in Environment and Society
Moderated by Elizabeth Chatterjee, University of Chicago
Thursday, April 20, 2023, 4:30–6:30pm
Room 122, Regenstein Library
Decolonizing Climate Politics
Farhana Sultana, Syracuse University
The extremely uneven and inequitable impacts of climate change mean that differently-located people experience, respond to, and cope with the climate crisis and related vulnerabilities in radically different ways. The coloniality of climate seeps through everyday life across space and time, weighing down and curtailing opportunities and possibilities through global racial capitalism, colonial dispossessions, and climate debts. Decolonizing climate needs to address the complexities of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, international development, and geopolitics that contribute to the reproduction of ongoing colonialities through existing global governance structures, discursive framings, imagined solutions, and interventions. This requires addressing both epistemic violences and material outcomes informed by feminist care praxis. By weaving through such mediations, I offer an understanding of climate coloniality that is theorized and grounded in lived experiences
Farhana Sultana↗ is Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Dr. Sultana is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary scholar of political ecology, water governance, climate change, post‐colonial development, social and environmental justice, decolonizing knowledge, and transnational feminisms. Her research and scholar-activism draw from her experiences of having lived and worked on three continents as well as from her backgrounds in the natural sciences, social sciences, and policy experience. Author of several dozen publications, her third books is Water Politics: Governance, Justice, and the Right to Water (Routledge, 2020). Dr. Sultana graduated Cum Laude from Princeton University (in Geosciences and Environmental Studies) and obtained her Masters and PhD (in Geography) from the University of Minnesota, where she was a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow. For recognition of her path-breaking research and public engagement, she was awarded the Glenda Laws Award from the American Association of Geographers for “outstanding contributions to geographic research on social issues” in 2019.
After "Net Zero:" What New Frames for Climate Action?
Holly Jean Buck, University at Buffalo
Climate action has been framed in terms of “mitigation”—emissions cuts—with net-zero emissions as the latest goal. Net-zero emissions relies on balancing some amount of remaining emissions with carbon removals (such as increased afforestation, or direct air capture with geologic storage). Yet at present, there is no policy to quantify what those remaining emissions should be and limit them; nor is there a real push to scale up carbon removals to climate-significant levels. Net-zero is also a frame that is strategically silent on the question of whether and how to phase out fossil fuels. This talk will lay out some reasons why net-zero is a flawed frame, and why it may not persist as a central way of tracking climate action. Then, we'll explore what happens if net-zero collapses as the goal for climate policy. We'll examine alternative frames and goals that may arise, and we'll consider whether and how researchers and civil society should push for those alternatives.
Holly Jean Buck↗ is a geographer and environmental social scientist studying rural futures, the politics of platforms, and how emerging technologies can address environmental challenges. She is the author of After Geoengineering (Verso, 2019) and Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough (Verso, 2021). An interdisciplinary researcher, she is a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's sixth assessment report, and the National Academies study A Research Strategy for Ocean Carbon Dioxide Removal and Sequestration. Recent publications examine the political ecologies of a prospective CO2 pipeline (Environment and Planning E), projections of residual emissions in national long-term climate strategies (Nature Climate Change), and what being extremely online means for climate action (in the forthcoming book Democracy in a Hotter Time, edited by David Orr). She holds a Ph.D in Development Sociology from Cornell University, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo in New York.