Planetary Responsibility

Climate change engages our sense of responsibility in ways that have yet to find effective conceptual or political expression. Responsibilities are of course assumed or ascribed in a variety of idioms, and by a diversity of actors; in the form of the commitments made by states to mitigate their emissions of CO2, in the strategies of climate change litigation, in urban governance initiatives, or in the decisions made by individuals to change their styles of life or their habits of consumption. But, even taken collectively, these ways of recognizing or performing responsibility seem inadequate. The challenge is to evolve a new political art of responsibility: how do we recollect, recompose, or reimagine ourselves as a polity fit for a planet that is very different from the Earth that we once took for granted? The question is not only how we address the future. We also no longer want to be the people who set in motion historical processes of discursive and extractive violence that are depoliticized by the term ‘anthropogenic’, and which are still playing themselves out, even in the making of climate science and climate governance. So what political art of responsibility would allow us to articulate accountability for the past into a capacity for responsiveness to contingent futures? And what responsibilities do scholars have in relation to these questions of responsibility? This meeting brings together a diversity of scholars to reflect on and advance the question of planetary responsibility, the term ‘planetary’ being as open to critique and speculation as the term ‘responsibility’. The object is to bring together critical reflection on our imaginaries, vocabularies or performances of responsibility, and experimentation in responsibility as a political art of recollection and recomposition.

Participants: >Jean d’Aspremont (Sciences Po), Mario Biagioli (UCLA), Simon Caney (Warwick), Paul Edwards (Stanford), Liz Fisher (Oxford), Andreas Folkers (Giessen), Anna Grear (Cardiff), Stephen Humphreys (LSE), Hannah Landecker (UCLA), Andrew Lang (Edinburgh), Horatia Muir-Watt (Sciences Po), Naomi Oreskes (Harvard), Alain Pottage (Sciences Po), Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Max Planck, Berlin), Thomas Scheffer (Frankfurt) and Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge).

> Programme (PDF, 97Ko)

For further details, please visit the Globinar website.

By invitation only.