28 September 2021: Webinar 3: Building Knowledge-Action Solidarities
Organized by the Working Group on the Political Economy of Sustainable Consumption and Production (Future Earth Knowledge and Action Network on Systems of Sustainable Consumption and Production)
28 September 2021 at 6:00AM to 7:30AM (Pacific); 3:00PM to 4:30PM (Central European Time); 6:30PM to 8:00PM (India); and 10:00PM to 11:30PM (Japan)
Please join us by registering at this link.
Please note that the link you receive upon registration will be used for all three webinars.
Panelists: K. J. Joy (India), Rasigan Maharajh (South Africa), Nnimmo Bassey (Nigeria), Ivonne Yanez (TBC; Ecuador)
Moderator: Manu V. Mathai
This webinar focuses on the how of social change. It records that challenge as one of changing the “enabling conditions such as rising inequality, injustice, obsessive productivity, consumerism, and manufactured aspirations that drive overconsumption” to more just, humane and sustainable ways. Borrowing a phrase from Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice, what this webinar seeks to model is a marriage of “indignation or wrath” against inequality and injustice with “argument and reasoning” to overcome this status quo. The goal can also be restated using language from Pierre Bourdieu in his discussion of The Logic of Practice, which stresses that “without violence, art or argument” the status quo tends to prevail. The challenge then for this webinar is to envision, perhaps even model a coming together of knowledge and action that moves away from the prevalent narrative of “translating science to inform policy” to one where “knowing and doing” are no longer distinct ontologies. The challenge is not one of translating for the other, but one of building solidarities to bridge hitherto separated domains.
The Webinar will discuss key questions including:
- How can co-producing knowledge-action be advanced as an imaginary for higher education in the Anthropocene, as well as in the allied spaces of funding that determine the boundaries of research, policy advocacy and activism?
- How to question power in these ways against a background of legal frameworks and increasingly authoritarian political dispensations that often criminalize rather than protect the interrogation of injustice and scrutiny of capital accumulation?
- How to step beyond “partnerships” and build “solidarity” between Knowledge and Action in the GS? I.e. How can academics from the GS and GN build solidarity with activists to advance sustainable production-consumption systems?
- What are the pitfalls of such an imagination?
Download the flyer and concept note of the webinar series.
The webinars will be recorded and later published on Future Earth’s website and Youtube channel, as well as broadcast and shared on Future Earth channels.
Contact
Manu V. Mathai, Future Earth SSCP KAN, manu.mathai[@t]apu.edu.in
AUTHOR
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