Urgent Futures, Slow Disasters: The Times of Climate Crisis

Catalog description

Climate change is throwing orders of time into disarray. In Over two centuries of accelerating emissions, industrialization has remixed the earth system, burning fossil fuels that were millions of years in the making. In this class, we will engage with scientific, historical, more-than-human, Indigenous, and decolonizing perspectives on how climate change is entangling planetary, ecological, and political temporalities in complicated ways. We will see how marginalized communities contend with a violence so gradual, imperceptible, and slow that it escapes attention in everyday life. How species, soils, and ecologies are affected differentially by a host of socially produced hazards: the timelines of coral bleaching and river eutrophication are not the same, but both contribute to a sense of crisis. By exploring different ways of thinking about time, can we find better ways of timing our knowledge of climate risks to acts of resistance? Materials will include scientific and historical texts, lake and ocean sediment cores, computer models, flow charts, resource mappings, and fictions. Readings may include: Barbara Adam, Sophia Roosth, Andreas Malm, Rob Nixon, Kyle Whyte, Michelle Bastian, Elaine Gan, Deborah Coen, Helge Jordheim, Cristophe Bonneuil, and Sarah Sharma.