Contact: Sydney Lane
Email: slane@umail.ucsb.edu

CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

A Nearly Carbon Neutral Virtual Lecture Series
Sponsored by the Environmental Humanities Initiative
University of California, Santa Barbara
May 17 – June 7, 2018

A growing consensus within the environmental humanities community recognizes increasingly that surviving the Anthropocene will involve mitigating climate impacts by revising non/human interactions across categories of race, gender, class, and species. In this nearly carbon-neutral virtual lecture series we will collectively explore the potentialities of an intersectional environmental and climate justice studies oriented specifically towards its relationships to the narrative imagination, mind studies, and animal studies. Through a series of virtual talks, we will address such questions as, how and why the question of nonhuman animals should be an issue approached from an environmental and climate justice perspective? Why has environmental justice discourse been largely anthropocentric? In what ways might a careful attention to human psychology provide fresh methods for intervention into environmental crisis? How might the adoption of narrative approaches in the modality of an “ethical witnessing” of climate injustices provide strategies for overcoming discriminatory roadblocks to address the violation of non/human rights? In answering these questions, this remote lecture series will reveal how attention to the commonly neglected categories of mind, animal, and imagination are essential to the success of a truly intersectional climate justice.

PANELS

(To view talks and Q&A sessions, click on the panel title. Select the speaker’s name for abstract.)

1. Climate and Environmental Justice: Politics of Resistance 

Protecting the Power to Pollute: Identity Co-Optation, Gender, and the Public Relations Strategies of Fossil Fuel Industries, Shannon Bell

Improve Your Habitat to Survive in the Long Run, Derrick Jensen

2. Psychological Approaches to Climate Justice

Feminist Resources for Addressing the Emotional Dimensions of Climate Change, Lesley Head

The Intergroup Foundations of Climate Change Justice, Janet Swim

3. Transspecies Perspectives on Climate Justice

Butte’s Berkeley Pit: Towards Posthumanist Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene Era, Louise Economides   

Parasitic Geostories: Rabies and Multispecies Precarity in Bali, Phillip Drake

Remember Kinglake, Kate Rigby

4. Climate Justice and the Ecological Imagination 

Climate Justice and Material Ecocriticism, Serpil Oppermann 

Guerrilla Narrative in the Wasteocene, Marco Armiero

Telling the Right Story: a Working-Class Ecology (WCE) Narrative, Stefania Barca