What if it’s too late to avoid some kind of ecological catastrophe? Maybe it’s not, and we should be doing everything we can so that it isn’t. Still, what if it is? Shouldn’t we also be talking about that? What kind of a future do we want to create for ourselves on such a horizon? What might it mean to collapse well?
The Department of Religious Studies will host the fifth and final Finite Futures Lecture Thursday, Nov. 21, from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. in Clapp Hall, Room 108. Finite Futures is a series of free public lectures by internationally renowned scholars and public intellectuals made possible by the Henry Luce Foundation.
For the final event, Sylvester Johnson, professor of Black studies at Northwestern University, will present “The Global South Is Our Future: Climate Collapse, Socio-Technical Innovation, and Global Governance after Democracy.”
Johnson will examine fundamental challenges to humanity posed by irreversible environmental harms amidst the global rise of authoritarianism and the accelerating pace of technological innovation. Taking his cue from the decades-long history of communities and institutions in the Global South that have tackled these issues, he will propose key lessons to be learned from the strategies and socio-technical innovations that have emerged in those contexts.
This lecture is free and open to the public, no registration required