This activity will be streamed live

SATURDAY 27 MAY 2017
Venue: Meier Auditorium

4.30 pm Razmig Keucheyan – The Rise of Eco-Nationalisms
With the rise in natural disasters, resource scarcity, food crises, the destabilisation of the poles and oceans, and the prospect of millions of ‘climate refugees’, the great powers are increasingly adopting a military response to ecological problems. The Cold War is over: welcome to the ‘green wars’. From New Orleans to the Siachen glacier via the Arctic floes, this presentation will explore the landmark sites of this new ‘climate geo-strategy’.

5.30 pm Yayo Herrero – Feminisms Before the Socio-Ecological Crisis
The collision between the expansive dynamics of capitalism and the physical limits of the planet undermines the material bases that sustain life. But human life is not only sustained by nature, its resources and cycles, the social metabolism also sustains itself by a set of relationships that take care of vulnerable and finite bodies. And this relational system is also in crisis.
The eco-social crisis is also a crisis of identity. It calls into question certain notions of identity, progress and emancipation that could be described as fossilised.
Historically, feminism has drawn attention to how this notion of identity was built upon the subordination of women, but it has not sufficiently related this critique to the evident insertion of human life into nature. Eco-feminism brings light in this direction and forces both movements to reflect anew.

6.30 pm Break

7 pm Jorge Riechmann – Rebuilding Cultures, Transforming Identities: On the Need for Socio-Ecological Conversion
‘How will the twenty-first century row / to get to where...,’ Felix Grande asks us in that immense poem La cabellera de la Shoá (The Hair of the Shoah). Indeed, the way ahead looks difficult: we know that BAU (Business As Usual) leads to the collapse of industrial societies. Ecocide, accompanied by genocide, is not an ineluctable fatality, but today we are advancing at full speed toward that abyss. To avoid this, deep changes would be necessary, comparable to those that shook human communities during the Neolithic Revolution and the Industrial Revolution; but in this case they would have to be intentional changes, guided by values such as sustainability, equality, cooperation and biophilia. Self-restraint: limiting oneself to allow the other to exist. Self-construction: political and moral DIY to remedy some of the defects of the faulty monkey that we are. Impossible? Since the alternatives are frightening, we will have to try. This presentation will examine some of the cultural dimensions of this possible Great Transformation.

BIOGRAPHIES
Yayo Herrero
Anthropologist, social educator and agricultural technical engineer; Director of FUHEM since 2012; founding partner of the Garúa S. Coop. Madrid. She was coordinator of the CCEIM of the Fundación General Universidad Complutense de Madrid between 2009–12. She is a leading researcher in the eco-feminist and eco-socialist field at a European level and has participated in numerous social initiatives on the promotion of human rights and social ecology, a field in which she has published more than twenty books and numerous articles. Member of the editorial boards of Hegoa and Papeles, she was also confederal coordinator of Ecologistas en Acción between 2005–14.

Razmig Keucheyan
PhD in Sociology and lecturer in Sociology at the Université de Bordeaux. Activist of the Swiss radical left and member of the Study Group on Methods of Sociological Analysis at the Sorbonne. He works in the field of ecology trying to show that the ecological crisis is not independent of political struggles. He argues that environmental impacts mainly affect people, specifically the suppressed classes, considering this phenomenon as ‘environmental racism’. In the same context, he has worked intensively in the process of the ‘financialisation of nature’ as one of the possible solutions for capitalism to cope with the ecological crisis. He is the author of The Left Hemisphere. Mapping Critical Theory Today (Verso, 2014) and Nature is a Battlefield. Towards a Political Ecology (Polity, 2016).

Jorge Riechmann
An essayist, he writes poetry, acts on issues of social ecology and teaches moral and political philosophy the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. His academic activity focuses on post-capitalist transitions; civilisation collapse; eco-socialism; political ecology; ‘green’ political philosophy; philosophy of sustainability; ecological ethics; agro-ethics; ethics applied to new technologies (biotechnologies, nanotechnologies...); philosophy of techno-science; and sociology of social movements (especially the environmental movement). He is the coordinator of the Transdisciplinary Research Group on Socio-Ecological Transitions (GinTRANS2). Among his extensive production on issues of environmental ethics, political ecology and ecological thinking, his most recent books are Autoconstrucción (Catarata, 2015) and ¿Derrotó el smartphone al movimiento ecologista? (Catarata, 2016). Two long extracts of his poetry are published in Futuralgia. Poesía reunida 1979–2000 (Calambur, 2011) and Entreser. Poesía reunida 1993–2007 (Monte Ávila, 2013). His most recent collection is Himnos craquelados (Calambur, 2015). Blog: www.tratarde.org.

Leah Temper. Mujeres Dongria Kondh cargando madera en Rayagada, Odisha, India.
Public Programmes
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Tel: 93 481 33 68

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