From Climate Coloniality to Climate Revolutions
Perspectives in Global Development: Fall 2023 Seminar Series
Abstract
The extremely uneven and inequitable impacts of climate change creates differential vulnerabilities, experiences, responses, and coping mechanisms across the world. Climate coloniality clarifies how to understand this in more nuanced ways. The coloniality of climate seeps through everyday life across space and time, weighing down and curtailing opportunities and possibilities through global racial capitalism, colonial dispossessions, and climate debts. Decolonizing climate needs to address the complexities of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, international development, and geopolitics that contribute to the reproduction of ongoing colonialities through existing global governance structures, discursive framings, imagined solutions, and interventions. This requires addressing both epistemic violences and material outcomes to foster care-full resplendent climate revolutions. By weaving through such mediations, Farhana Sultana offers an understanding of climate coloniality and climate revolutions that are theorized and grounded in lived experiences.
About the speaker
Farhana Sultana is Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, where she is also the Research Director for Environmental Collaboration and Conflicts at the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflicts and Collaboration (PARCC). Dr. Sultana is an internationally recognized and award-winning interdisciplinary scholar of political ecology, water governance, climate justice, post‐colonial development, social and environmental justice, decolonizing knowledge, and transnational feminisms. Author of several dozen publications, her research and scholar-activism draw from her experiences of having lived and worked on three continents as well as from her backgrounds in the natural sciences, social sciences, and policy experience. Prior to joining Syracuse, she taught at King’s College London and worked at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Dr. Sultana graduated Cum Laude from Princeton University (in Geosciences and Environmental Studies) and obtained her Masters and PhD (in Geography) from the University of Minnesota, where she was a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow. She was awarded the Glenda Laws Award from the American Association of Geographers for “outstanding contributions to geographic research on social issues” in 2019.
Perspectives in Global Development
The Perspectives in Global Development seminars are held Wednesdays from 12:20-1:20 p.m. eastern time during the semester. The series is presented in a hybrid format with some speakers on campus and others appearing via Zoom. All seminars are shown in Emerson Hall 135. Students, faculty and the general public are welcome to attend. The series is co-sponsored by the Department of Global Development, the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and the School of Integrative Plant Science as part of courses GDEV 4961, AEM 4961, NTRES 4961, GDEV 6960, AEM 6960, and NTRES 6960.
