Dear friends and colleagues, students and teachers moved by the climate crisis we are in, you are all invited to attend and participate in our conference, which opens today, Monday, October 19.
Confronting Climate Crisis with Systemic Alternatives in the Age of the Coronavirus
A Nearly-Carbon Neutral Conference at UC Santa Barbara
Hosted by the EJ/CJ Hub at UCSB’s Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies with the support of the Center for Climate Justice at UC Merced
October 19 – November 16, 2020
https://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/?
This conference is occurring largely online. During the conference, which is now taking place for the next four weeks, talks are available for viewing on the conference website. Q&A will also take place online during this period, as participants and registered attendees will be able to pose questions to speakers via online comments and speakers will be able to reply in the same way. Both the talks and Q&A sessions will remain up on the website as a permanent archive of the event.
There will be no registration fee for the conference. Although this online conference will have its own carbon footprint, as data centers and web activity also require energy, we expect that it will only be a small fraction of that of a conventional conference, likely just 1-3%.
As hosts of nearly-carbon neutral conferences for the past five years, one thing that COVID-19 has made clear is that this is the conference model of the present and the future. As we are all discovering, an advantage to this approach is that all individuals who would not otherwise be able to become involved in a conference (owing to distance or financial limitations for example) will be able to fully take part.
We hope to promote lively discussion on all the talks, sessions, and topics, as well as help build a community of scholars with intersecting teaching and research interests.
Please feel welcome to participate in this nearly-carbon neutral conference, which will be open to comments on the talks till Monday, November 16
John Foran, co-coordinator foran@soc.ucsb.edu
Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies
Ken Hiltner, co-coordinator hiltner@english.ucsb.edu
Professor of English and Environmental Studies
CONFRONTING THE CLIMATE CRISIS WITH SYSTEMIC ALTERNATIVES IN THE AGE OF CORONAVIRUS
A NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL CONFERENCE
CO-SPONSORED BY UC SANTA BARBARA’S ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES INITIATIVE AND THE CENTER FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE
Air travel to conferences, talks, and meetings can account for a third or more of the carbon footprint for a typical scholar or university. This event employed a nearly carbon-neutral (NCN) conference approach that reduced greenhouse gas emissions by a factor of 100. For more on “academia’s biggest dirty little secret” and the rationale behind this conference model, as well as details on how to coordinate online events of this sort, see our Overview / Practical Guide.
The UC Santa Barbara Environmental and Climate Justice Hub invites you to take part in a nearly carbon-neutral online conference of pre-recorded talks that will collectively explore the range of environmental and climate justice initiatives ideas, visions, movements, strategic orientations, and on the ground alternatives that resist extinction by confronting the current crisis in every kind of way.
In 2018 and 2019, the state of play in the climate crisis seemed to shift, with urgent climate reports, the rise of new social movements and tactics, especially among young people, and a pluriverse of proposals and projects for more life-affirming ways of being on this Earth.
Now, well into 2020, the world is beset by a global pandemic that is devastating lives and livelihoods and a climate crisis that worsens intensifying inequalities, fraying political systems, and cultures of violence everywhere, from police brutality to authoritarian governments to U.S. militarism.
While people have celebrated reduced CO2 emissions due to economic stoppage, communities at the margins of the world are faced with even stronger extractivism (of fossil fuels, mining, agro-industries, etc.). They are similarly identifying the interconnectedness of the health crisis and the systems at the source of climate injustices – capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy.
Collective social forces of and for climate justice and systemic alternatives are confronting this renewed crisis with imagination, new forms of online organizing, and hard work.
In this conference, we invite papers that engage with these global drivers of environmental and climate crisis and investigate their deep structures and histories. Likewise, contributions may analyze alternatives and the possibilities of more just climate futures. We also welcome other forms of participation that seek to bridge the academic, social movement, and policy domains.
This online conference will take place from Monday, October 19 to Monday, November 16. We hope to create spaces for real-time discussion and analysis of the U.S. election on November 3, the People’s Assemblies to prepare for COP 26, the current state of the pandemic, and the unforeseeable events that will occur everywhere between now and then.
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
Click the Panel Titles to view videos and participate in the discussion. Click the Stream Headers to see Abstracts and Presenter Bios.
CONFERENCE WELCOME AND INTRODUCTIONS
John Foran and Tracey Osborne
STREAM 1: Emergent Politics of the COVID Pandemic
Panel 1.1: What COVID is teaching us about the fight for climate justice (Marlene Hale, Tasnim Rekik, Kristen Perry, and Jen Gobby)
Panel 1.2: Climate Justice Movement Strategy During the United Nations Climate Conference, the COVID-19 Pandemic, and Racial Justice Uprisings (Brigid Mark, Corrie Grosse, Theo Lequesne, and Sam Grant)
Panel 1.3: Confronting COVID-19 (John Foran, Ashish Kothari, Shrishtee Bajpai, Giorgos Kallis, and Alfredo Saad-Filo)
Panel 1.4: Indigenous resistance and responses to COVID-19 in the Amazon Basin (Sylvia Cifuentes)
Panel 1.5: Labor in the COVID-Era (Vanessa Sloan Morgan, Vicky Johnson, Danielle Falzon and Laura Bahlman)
Panel 1.6: Media justice and socio-environmental struggles during COVID-19 times: Experiences from Mexico (Ana Salgado, Mónica Montalvo, Ximena Torres, and Jéssica Coyotecatl)
STREAM 2: Communities of Resistance/Resilience
Panel 2.1: Climate Refugee Stories: Building an Archive of Resistance (Tina Shull, Tanaya Dutta Gupta, Christine Wheatley, Emma Crow-Willard, and Sienna Leis)
Panel 2.2: An Intergenerational Panel: Personal and Collective Resistance in Times of Uncertainty (Tianna Arredondo, Gabi Jubran, Mila Aliana, and Celia Alario)
Panel 2.3: Climate Justice in Central and South America (Melina Smith, Shea Creatham, and Louisiana Lighsley)
Panel 2.4: Abolition Ecology (T.J. Demos, A. Laurie Palmer, and Martabel Wasserman)
Panel 2.5: Climate Justice and Renewal I: Fossil Fuels, False Climate Solutions, and Popular Responses (Brian Tokar, Marcelo Calazans, Nnimmo Bassey, and Patrick Bond)
Panel 2.6: Climate Justice and Renewal II: The Politics and Promise of Local Alternatives (Brian Tokar, Georges F. Félix, Terran Giacomini, and Kelley Roache)
STREAM 3: Climate Justice Education, Politics, and Movements
Panel 3.1: Curating Climate: New Projects in the Environmental Arts and Humanities (Persephone Pearl, Nicole Seymour, Min Hyoung Song, and Ali Sperling)
Panel 3.2: The Politics of Climate Activism (Ariel Salleh, Tom Charles Osher, AJ Reed, and Benjamin Weinger)
Panel 3.3: The 2020 U.S. Elections and Climate Justice (David Cobb and Mel Figueroa)
Panel 3.5: Climate Finance Justice: International Perspectives on Climate Policy, Social Justice, and Capital (Lauren Gifford, Chris Knudson, and Laura Sauls)
Panel 3.6: Transforming Education to Confront the Climate Crisis (Vasna Ramasar, Manolo Callahan, Alessandra Pomarico, Udi Mandel, Andy Szasz, Mithika Mwenda, Daniel Fernandez, Mark Stemen, John Foran, and Richard Widick)
Panel 3.7: The Price of Carbon Fantasies: Understanding, Resisting, and Seeking Justice Beyond Neoliberal Climate Policy Delusions (Patrick Bond and Larry Lohmann)
STREAM 4: Alternative Futures, Technological and Political
Panel 4.1: Project MEER: ReflEction: the Path to Sustainability Amongst Catastrophic Climate Change (Ye Tao)
Panel 4.3: Systemic Alternatives: Transition Towns Movement (Don Hall, Jessica Alvarez Parfrey, Anna Willow, and John Foran)
Panel 4.4: Anthropocene Media (Leslie Sklair, Gabi Jubran, Dana James)
