LUCSUS online seminars – Spring 2022 “Connecting the Local and the Global”

LUCSUS Seminars at Lund University

Issues ranging from climate change and pandemics to finance and digitalization often evoke notions of ‘the global’. Yet, though global, these processes are always grounded in the local; emerging from, having an impact on, and transformed by concrete local contexts and experiences. Connecting the global with the local is central to LUCSUS research and teaching. With this seminar series, we zoom in on the situated experiences, follow the connections, and tease out the relations that link-local with the global.

The seminar series covers topics ranging from climate justice, activism, and decolonization, to governance, health, and digitalization. The LUCSUS seminars are open for the public, held online and take place Thursdays from 11 am to 12 noon.

Sixth Seminar – “Climate change loss and damage in Australia: perceptions, root causes and the formation of (un)resilient subjects”

Climate change losses and damages are deleterious impacts that occur beyond social or physical limits to adaptation. Although loss and damage research has understandably focused on populations considered the most at-risk to climate change, such as Small Island Developing States, all countries are experiencing losses and damages today. Australia is one such country, in which material wealth and narratives of promethean-like resilience to natural hazards and climate change are slowly being shattered by escalating losses. My fieldwork in regional Australia identified many extreme events and slow-onset processes that are leading to both economic and non-economic losses and damages. This seminar will draw from my ethnographic fieldwork to provide an overview of some of the key processes and factors driving vulnerability to climate change in regional Australia and the formation of (un)resilient subjects. The contributions from this research will problematise the wealthy equals resilient narrative and show that loss and damage is a global issue with implications for broader climate politics and social and environmental justice.

Speaker

Guy Jackson is currently a postdoctoral fellow at LUCSUS working on the Formas project Recasting the disproportionate impacts of climate change extremes (DICE). Throughout 2021 Guy undertook extensive fieldwork in regional Australia with a range of actors including federal, state and local government workers, environmentalists, First Nations people, social service providers, and scientists. Guy is exploring theoretical and empirical questions centred around understanding perceptions and experiences of climate change loss and damage, the root causes of vulnerability, and the governmentality of climate change.

Venue

The seminar will take place in Wrangel, Biskopsgatan 5, room 117 (Lund University).