The Uses of Messiness — For a Reparatory Reading of the Anthropocene

Humanity is operating in crisis mode. The climate emergency has developed into panic responses. Declarations of emergency have swept institutions, following a youth-led social movement that has built momentum for a radical transformation. Promises of radical transformation proliferate in academic discourse, both from the natural and social sciences. Transformation thinking seeps into policy and practice—prescriptions for a Green New Deal, which in Europe have crystalized into a continent-wide plan for action, contain the promise of a government-led global transformation. 

One characteristic feature of those responses is a concern with reordering the world. Many of these epochal narratives have a tone of nostalgia, looking back to a well-ordered past when climate change was not yet a concern or perhaps when we lived ordered, unpolluted lives. Practices of ordering are visible in international climate change governance, climate urbanism, and everyday climate change action. However, this impulse towards ordering has already encountered the messy realities of the world. The specter of authoritarianism haunts the deployment of a politics of ordering in climate change.

In this lecture, I propose to engage with an alternative, reparatory reading of the landscape of climate change action. Such reparatory reading requires embracing the world as messy and harnessing that messiness as a means for delivering situated actions for a heterogeneous edifice of hope. 
 

Vanesa Castán Broto is Professor of Climate Urbanism, University of Sheffield, UK, where she heads a research group on that topic. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project LOACT (Low Carbon Action in Ordinary Cities) and of the GCRF-funded project (for now) CESET (Community Energy and Sustainable Transitions in Ethiopia, Malawi and Mozambique). She is also a Lead Author of the 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group II.

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