Suicide, Climate, and the Loss of Home
Thursday 30 April 2026, 12 midday - 1.30pm
Seminar Room 56, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
All welcome
This talk considers political feelings about climate change. It does this by examining the problem of suicide as it correlates to environmental conditions. I argue that environmental degradation creates life conditions that challenge people's ability or willingness to endure. But also that environmental change is manifest within the body at the molecular level, where it also shapes capacities of endurance. I show how these two registers of feeling combine in practice by tracing two examples of feedback loops in the United States: the first around housing and the second around pharmaceuticals.
These feedback loops help illustrate the counter-intuitive ways that suicide and climate are entangled through the embodied mind in the capitalist system. In each one the biochemical accumulates with the socioeconomic and political to necessitate endurance and prod existential threat.
Julie Livingston is Julius Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. A cross-disciplinary scholar with training in history, anthropology, and public health, she is the author of four books Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality (co-authored with Andrew Ross); Self-devouring Growth: a Planetary Parable told from Southern Africa; Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic; and Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana, and is co-editor of several volumes as well as two special issues of Social Text: Collateral Afterworlds (coedited with Zoe Wool) and Interspecies (coedited with Jasbir Puar). A 2013 MacArthur Fellow, she is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes. She is currently at work on a new book of essays about the relationship between climate change and suicide.
