Creating a Cosmopolitics of Climate Change

Climate change requires unprecedented cooperation across disciplines and worldviews, creating emerging experimental ‘cosmopolitical’ fields in climate negotiation, action and engagement. Intrinsically linked with human actions, climate change challenges the modern exclusion of nature from politics, and conceptual separation of the social and natural in academia. Cosmopolitics can widen communication among worlding practices, sparking re-conceptualisation of the relations between humans and their environments.

This conference will consider the construction of a cross disciplinary and intercultural cosmopolitics in climate engagement and action that takes seriously indigenous and local community worlding practices and leadership. We will explore the challenges faced by Indigenous peoples and local communities in contributing to climate negotiation; collaborating with scientific communities; and in taking action to shape their environments. We will explore how local and Indigenous perceptions of climate change can converse with scientific understandings of the same, engaging the attention of a wider public and policy makers, and how far such understandings are enabled by contemporary states. Through interdisciplinary engagement the conference intends to facilitate collaborative knowledge production across scientific and Indigenous perspectives, enabling the creation of meaningful and impactful climate legislation and policy.

Participants and abstracts

The conference will be followed by drinks in the Anthropology student common room from 5.30pm.

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