Climate Crisis and Democratic Imaginaries

Climate crisis is not only an urgent challenge to which existing democratic decision-making procedures might be more or less fit for purpose; it also determines the material and social conditions that shape how democracy might be envisaged as a way of life today and in the future. This workshop will consider how climate crisis both constrains and enables democratic imaginaries within our contemporary political conjuncture by bringing together a group of democratic theorists to engage with the recent work of three scholars: Lars Tønder, Mathias Thaler and Mihaela Mihai.

Supported by: HaSS Cornwall and the Environment and Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter and AHRC Networking Grant: AH/Y00132X/1 (2024-2025) on Climate Crisis and Democratic Reform (James Muldoon & Clare Saunders)

Contact organiser: Andrew Schaap

As the climate crisis rages, politicians and community activists are fighting to create a more sustainable society. Lars Tønder's forthcoming book focuses on the concept of power in relation to sustainability and shows how it is possible to understand power in a new and more complete way: as not only something humans have, but also as something that arises in the interaction between the human and the non-human.

Respondents

Amanda Machin (Agder), Paul Apostolidis (LSE), Sophia Hatzissavadou (Bath)

Visions of utopia – some hopeful, others fearful – have become increasingly prevalent in recent times. Mathias Thaler's book, No Other Planet, examines expressions of the utopian imagination with a focus on the pressing challenge of how to inhabit a climate-changed world.

Respondents

Ruth Kinna (Loughborough), Marit Hammond (Keele), Gerard Delanty (Susex)

Mihaela Mihai's forthcoming paper brings theories of representation and chronopolitics to bear on a flurry of recently published memoirs chronicling activists’ emotional and temporal alienation. These texts aim both to summon the already grieving into a self-aware constituency and bridge the ‘segregated temporalities’ of hegemonic and environmentalists’ time. As such, they illuminate a key aspect of representation in the context of environmental crisis: that it can be primarily understood as grounded in a chronopolitical conflict over competing understanding of time.

Respondent

Andrew Schaap (Exeter)

Banner image: Still frame from Purple, 2017. Six screen film installation by John Akomfrah. © Smoking Dogs Films; Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Environment and Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter, Penryn, United Kingdom