Discourse and Sustainability

The Seminar Series "Discourse and Sustainability" is an international forum for presenting and discussing new, cutting edge, research on discourse and issues of sustainability, environment, climate change and ecology.

Please register with this group to receive an invite for the online meetings on Microsoft Teams.

Our next seminar takes place on 15 December 2023, 1-2pm, where we have the pleasure to welcome Anabella Carvalho (University of Minho) to talk about  "Political imaginaries and climate change"

ABSTRACT:

At the basis of climate change, lie key political issues. Besides the obvious - namely policy choices concerning energy, land-use planning and mobility (to name just a few) -, this includes (decisions on) the rules of the game for global and national economies, the social distribution of costs and benefits, the goal of perpetual economic growth, and other fundamental values and priorities that underpin political regimes. In the last few years, numerous voices have called for fundamental social transformations to address climate change. Yet, the possibility of significantly altering what lies, politically, at the roots of climate change appears unfeasible or even unthinkable to most. Identifying spaces where current politics is interrupted, i.e. where some of those fundamental aspects are visibly confronted, is therefore a critical research task. This presentation will look for such interruptions in young climate activism. Conceiving political imaginaries as horizons of political possibility (of agency, of social re-organization, of re-distribution, etc.), it will examine how political transformation is textually formulated by different activist groups, as well as enacted in multimodal communicative events that include the body. The limits and tensions in the political horizons constructed by some instances of climate activism will also be discussed.

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The programme Winter Term 2023-2024:

20 October 2023, 12noon-1pm (note the different time) John Dryzek (University of Canberra) 'The Rise (and Fall?) of Grey Radicalism'

17 November 2023, 1-2pm, Tom Bartlett (University of Glasgow),  Just Transitions to sustainable practice - Is there a role for discourse analysts?

15 December 2023, 1-2pm, Anabella Carvalho (University of Minho), Political imaginaries and climate change

19 January 2024, 1-2 pm, Ben Clarke, (Göteborgs universitet), TBC