Circles of solidarity: Reimagining environment and climate politics scholarship in a crisis-ridden world

Environmental and climate politics scholarship must confront the triple crises of vulgar inequalities, resurgence of authoritarianism, and the ever-worsening climate and environmental breakdowns. Any meaningful response to this ‘polycrisis’ requires an astute understanding of the extractive nature of academia, which is built on the binaries of Global North vs South; mainstream vs critical; and celebrity vs the plebian.

In this Earth Day Keynote, Prakash Kashwan invites collective thinking on how to build scholarly communities that foster rigorous exchange and learning without promoting celebrity culture or reinforcing structural oppressions. To do so, Kashwan unpacks the somewhat counter-intuitive entanglements between the oppressive hold of crass positivism and a variety of depoliticized counter-responses that tend to flatten questions of scale, materiality, and politics of representation. In these responses, violent silences are replaced by rhetorical rejection of catchy abstractions of capitalism, coloniality, and (western) science. Such fragmentation of progressive responses is owed, in part, to ontological and epistemological differences between social sciences and humanities. Yet, we must guard against relying solely on counterarguments that stand across a convenient epistemic chasm from the dominant modes of research, analysis, and policymaking.  

Distilling lessons from the ongoing efforts to build interdisciplinary bridges, and the struggles of BIPOC communities the world over, Kashwan calls for nurturing “circles of solidarity” devoted to a collective reimagination of the praxis of environmental and climate politics. We aim nothing short of a just and ecologically healthy worldmaking.  

Registration will close two hours before the event begins.