Andrea Pia (LSE): Corallers of Crises: Between the horror and glee of climate inaction
| Dates: | 25 November 2024 |
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| Times: | 15:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Andrea Pia |
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In a recent statement, Scientists Rebellion, the international organization of environmental activists with a scientific background, posed the question: "What's the point of documenting in ever greater detail the catastrophe we face, if we're not willing to do anything about it?" Starting from this provocation, this paper investigates psycho-cultural barriers to collective action on climate change by juxtaposing ethnographic research conducted within youth climate movements and organizations across Europe with the broader anthropological corpus on lay citizens and sustainability experts' complicity with the continuation of the climate predicament.
Through this lens, the paper illuminates how inaction requires subtle but agentive forms of emotional and imaginative foreclosure that normalise collective inadequacy and incuriosity for what ‘change’ means in climate change. It also brings into view yet-to-be-theorized layers of the affective complexion—such as raw feelings of horror and glee—regularly suppressed yet fundamentally underscoring the power of disavowal, neglect, and anxiety in the unfolding of runaway climate change. In so doing, the intervention borrows from the vocabulary of Western political ontology and psychoanalysis to theorise an affective posture—an "enclosing" or "corralling" attitude—aimed at priming subjects so that they could gain emotionally from engaging with the most disquieting implications of climate subversions while deferring indefinitely the phenomenologically grounded consensus required to rise up to them.
Speaker
Andrea Pia
Organisation: LSE
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Hanson Room
Humanities Bridgeford Street
Manchester
