Learning to live with climate change
How can we grapple with the ethical and emotional dilemmas that climate change poses? How do our theories and practices of teaching, learning and living together need to change if we are to respond adequately to socio-ecological crises? How might we support each other in the challenges of making sense of and responding to the unsettling traumas of climate collapse?
To launch Postdoctoral Fellow Blanche Verlie’s new book, Learning to live with climate change: From anxiety to transformation (available to read here for free), we invite you to join four environmental scholars as they apply feminist, intersectional and more-than-human perspectives to explore questions of climate anxiety, uncertain futures, and living as a part of rapidly changing ecologies.
This event was presented online on Thursday 26 August 2021.
Speakers
Blanche Verlie is an Australian climate change educator and researcher currently living on unceded Gadigal Country. Blanche has over 10 years’ experience teaching sustainability and climate change in universities, as well as experience in community-based climate change communication and activism. Blanche has a multidisciplinary background, brings an intersectional feminist approach to her work and is passionate about supporting people to engage with the emotional intensities of climate change. Blanche is currently completing a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney.
Astrida Neimanis (Chair) is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, in Kelowna, BC Canada, located on the unceded lands of the Syilx Okanagan peoples. Astrida’s research focuses on water, weather, and embodiment, often emerging in collaboration with other writers, artists, and makers. Her most recent book is Bodies of Water (2017).
Sarah Jaquette Ray is chair of the Environmental Studies Department at Humboldt State University, on Wiyot land. She is the author of The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture (2013) and A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet (2020), which is an existential toolkit for the climate generation. Her current projects are a book and website called “An Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators,” and a professional development workshop for higher education professionals, the Climate Curriculum Lab, which builds capacity to address students’ psychosocial relationships with climate change.
Mindy Blaise is a Vice Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow, in the School of Education, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia. She is also Co-director of the Centre for People, Place & Planet and Co-founder of the Common Worlds Research Collective. Her transdisciplinary and postdevelopmental research with the more-than-human uses responsive, affect-focused and creative methods to rework a humanist ontology. She is interested in how the more-than-human and feminist speculative research practices activate new meanings about childhood that sit outside the narrow confines of developmentalism.
Header image: Flickr Commons