Date: Monday, April 15th
Time: 5:00PM CST
Location: Zoom – 922 1935 5842
On Monday, April 15th, Professor Robyn Eckersley will have a seminar on Climate Emergency and the Future of Democracy. This seminar tracks the rise of climate emergency claim making as a global discourse, and takes stock of the criticisms from those who argue that the emergency frame should be abandoned because it will necessarily undermine democracy. Against these critics, Professor Eckersley offers an alternative and more sympathetic democratic critique of the grammar of climate emergency claim making, and then poses and critically explores two questions that have been ignored by the critics: what might happen to liberal democracy if the climate emergency movement fails in its demands upon the state? Could the climate emergency movement be a potential saviour of democracy because it seeks to build legitimacy for measures that would safeguard the fundamental socio-ecological conditions for the survival of democratic states?
Robyn Eckersley is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor in Political Science in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She has published widely in the fields of environmental political theory and International Relations, with a particular focus on ecological democracy, the greening of states, and the ethics, politics and governance of climate change. She received a Distinguished Scholar Award (Environmental Studies Section) at the International Studies Association Annual Convention in Toronto 2019.
