This event is part of the TORCH Climate Crisis Thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences Network.
To register for this event, click here.
Please email TORCH (torch@humanities.ox.ac.uk) if you experience any trouble accessing this talk.
The experience, public understanding, political framing and unfolding consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic are, whether we like it or not, now inextricably part of our thinking about present and the future. When the network was set up, everyone involved had ideas about the sorts of disciplinary, interdisciplinary, public and policy interventions that we thought humanities and social sciences could make in climate conversations. These had been the subject of our roundtables and collaborative projects before the lockdown.
With the pandemic, we are once again in a situation where 'the science' is considered to be the main explanatory and interpretative tool, but public responses and political action are being led by a host of considerations better accessed by the expertise of humanities and social sciences. This is more obvious than it has been in the case of climate science, and may be presenting our disciplines with an opportunity. However, as Nayanika Mathur points out in her contribution to the network blog, it is crucial to resist the formulation of shared narratives around the pandemic that speak from the most privileged perspectives and inhibit the radical change needed to respond to the mounting climate crisis.
The roundtable, then will consider such questions as: how far and in what ways, has 'climate crisis thinking' been affected? How can we bring our expertise into diverse, rapidly-changing and unfamiliar situations? What might the pandemic do to the intellectual shape and future of our fields and how can we respond most productively to this altered reality?
To register for this event, click here.
Please email TORCH (torch@humanities.ox.ac.uk) if you experience any trouble accessing this talk.
Climate Crisis Thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences, TORCH Networks
