Coloniality and Climate Change

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Why is talking about climate change without reference to colonial pasts an incomplete conversation? Why is a forward-looking climate justice conversation incomplete unless it is also looking back? How does coloniality present today? How does the global south figure in writing on climate change? Can there be a role for the global south in the climate justice conversation that recognizes its vulnerability to climate change but goes beyond portraying it as always and only vulnerable, devastated and/or menacing? In this class we will begin with the premise that the answer is yes: not only is such a role possible, but it must actively be created if the climate justice conversation is to an inclusive one. Examining representations of climate refugees, extreme weather events, and imagined geographies of conflicts, and informed by scholarship on racialized constructions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrants, in this class we will collectively work through the intersections between the political and ecological that today determine the movement of humans, capital, and knowledge. Our collective endeavor will be to: (i) understand writing on climate change with a focus on its implicit (yet predominant) threat and risk imaginaries; (ii) question the role of the global south in such writing; and (iii) craft a lexicon that is cognizant of colonial pasts and their continuity, and relates geographies, histories and politics in more equal ways.