Building Sustainable Communities Open Monthly Gathering (OMG)
The third and final OMG of the semester will feature Reed Kurtz from the Department of Political Science. Reed will be presenting and discussing his relevant and interesting work on the current climate crisis. His manuscript is titled “It’s a Crisis, Not an Emergency: Climate Justice and the Critique of Exceptional Politics Amid COVID-19 and Capitalogenic Global Warming.” All are welcome to attend!
Project abstract
How should we characterize the political nature of problems like climate change? Leading discourses and practices conceptualize anthropogenic global warming (AGW) as an “emergency” which demands interventions by state authorities. I argue we should reject this framing and instead recognize climate change and other systemic problems as derived from the social and ecological crises of capitalism, requiring an alternative approach. Framing global warming as “anthropogenic” and an “emergency” enables a “politics of exception” that reifies and obscures historical and political dynamics of climate change, including its origins in racialized capitalism, while mobilizing state and capitalist forces, i.e. those same sources of the crisis. In contrast, recognizing the “capitalogenic” origins of global warming better enables us to confront the diverse challenges of climate change as not just socio-technical issues of governance, managed technocratically by elites, but a political problem of justice, to be resolved democratically by those most affected. To make this argument, I draw upon critical perspectives on capitalism, security, and exceptional politics while examining emergent political practices and discourses among elites and activists on climate change, drawing insights as well from the COVID-19 pandemic and experiences of violence and resistance by communities of color in the wake of these events.