Round tables > A university changed by climate? Towards new practices and epistemologies

A Climate-Changed University? Towards New Practices and Epistemologies

 Thursday, October 2nd from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM

 Centre des Colloques, room 3.03

Organization : Cécile Roudeau (LARCA, Université Paris Cité) and Paul-Henri Giraud (CECILLE, Université de Lille)

Speakers : Nathalie Blanc (CNRS/LADYSS, Université Paris Cité), Capucine Boidin (IHEAL/CREDA, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), Thomas Dutoit (CECILLE, Université de Lille), Yves Figuereido (LARCA, Université Paris Cité), Renata Freitas Machado (Centre des Politiques de la Terre, Université Paris Citél), Clara-Louise Mourier (LARCA/CECILLE, Université de Lille/Université Paris Cité), Dolly Jørgensen (Université de Stavanger, Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities, Norvège)

Abstract :

Hurricanes, landslides, droughts and floods, water and air pollution have become the unsubtle reminders of our destructive human footprint. Whether we call it the age of the Anthropocene or not, something has changed. That much we know. We also know that this new condition has forced us to reconsider many of the concepts and practices we have taken for granted. We must invent new paradigms, new laws, new narratives, new practices. And the university is no exception. It could, perhaps, be the ideal place for such reinventions.

35 years after Jacques Derrida’s “No Apocalypse, Not Now” (1989) asked those working in history, literature, languages, and philology to reassess their (in)competence when confronted with the crisis then at hand—nuclear destruction—, we are again and anew facing the urgency of engaging with the state of the humanities and their place in the university as human societies are facing various forms of global extinction and climate change.  In other words, the humanities within the university once again find themselves facing a momentous injunction, that of thinking their own end(s).

This roundtable will consider our present aporia from the perspective of “American literatures, histories and cultures” and within the precincts of our disciplinary affiliations, if only to question such historical, political, and epistemological territorialization of our practices, manners of reading and modes of knowledge. In a sense, the radical transdisciplinarity and potential undisciplinability of climate requires that the (climate-changed) humanities pursue the reflexive work of rethinking their own history and their own premises in relation to other disciplines, notably the social sciences and the hard sciences. 

The roundtable, then, proposes to reflect on the stakes of a climate-changed university, the impact of such awareness on our epistemologies (what are the end(s) of the humanities), our research, but also our research practices (new modalities of research, taking into account the carbon footprint of our research activities, transdisciplinarity, questioning of the national scale of analysis and methodological nationalism, research-creation, research-activism), our curricula, our pedagogies, the management of university spaces (classrooms, shared spaces, green spaces, or the lack thereof), the degree of imbrication of the university and the city, the management of stress and affects related to ecoanxiety among students, faculty and staff…