This year, given the growing interest in our department and amongst PPI students in climate justice, we are hosting a hands-on workshop to discuss how philosophers could play a uniquely important role in motivating the political will to advance climate justice efforts.
This past year, the director of PPI, Michaila Peters, had the opportunity to travel to COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan and meet with rural and indigenous climate activists. In these discussions, it became clear that having other perspectives on climate justice in the room, be they from indigenous traditions, feminists in the Global South, or otherwise, is not necessarily enough to instigate a paradigm shift in the stakeholders who need to invest in climate solutions. In order for the content of their wisdom to be taken seriously, these representatives need to employ careful, pedagogical strategies that can disrupt capitalist-colonialist-epistemologies. We believe, after these discussions, that the art of teaching philosophy, wherein ideally, we get students to shift from one paradigm to another and back, and critically evaluate comparative perspectives, offers useful insights to this problem. Indeed, philosophers may be helpful beyond theorizing about the environment, by reflecting on the practical skills of communication we develop in the classroom, and how they may be integrated into climate activism on the streets or in formal negotiations like the UN.
In this three part workshop, we hope to explore this possibility with graduate students and a mix of speakers who are climate activists, climate theorists, and negotiators who each have a unique perspective on what barriers they have faced to generating genuine investment in climate justice.
Program for the Third Workshop (lunch provided)
Michaila Peters, founder and director of PPI, will give a talk on her own experience as a delegate of the UN COP29 meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan this past November, as well as her experience growing up in rural America, to discuss the role she thinks philosophy needs to play in generating the political will for climate justice.
She will then host a conversation to launch a Philosophers for Sustainability project and Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) Chapter at BC, so that BC students can extend the conversations of these workshops in these ongoing projects in the philosophical community.