Co-hosted research colloquium by SARChI Chairs in Science Communication and Land, Environment and Sustainable Development.
3-4 April 2025, Mont Fleur, Stellenbosch.
Nature and Culture are positioned as binary in Western Enlightenment thinking. Yet, in the age of the Anthropocene, with abundant evidence of anthropogenic climate breakdown as a result of carbon emissions, we are reminded that Nature and Culture are dialogically entwined. This colloquium seeks to explore how research and theory in science communication and sustainable development can and should advance nuanced empirical and theoretical understandings of “Nature-Cultures”.
A dominant response to anthropogenic climate change, aside from flat denialism and mediated misinformation, has been to turn to various technoscientific solutions to address dire predictions of devastating socio-ecological consequences for human and other-than-human life. These calls for ‘technoscientific fixes’ include solar geoengineering, carbon capture technologies, carbon credits, and the rapid expansion of renewable energy infrastructures to prevent a fossil fuel-driven catastrophe in the coming decades. Yet, numerous critics insist that financialised and technoscientific solutions cannot address the systemic problems of over-consumption of energy and the ecologically destructive nature of limitless growth models of development. Meanwhile, climate scientists and activists insist that the pace of devastating climate change is accelerating exponentially, and urgent action is required immediately. These debates take place in public realms shaped by asymmetric media economies, dominated by powerful legacy and tech companies, and are dominated by powerful narratives linked to various structures of power (the fossil fuel industry, in particular).
This moment of ‘poly-crises’ raises many questions that we plan to address in this colloquium: How do ‘we’ – in the global North or global South – think about, act upon, and make liveable futures in the time of Anthropocene/Capitalocene – a period of unprecedented life-threatening socio-ecological crises? How will future human and other-than-human life adapt to increasing ecological instability? How do ‘we’ move away from cultures of fast consumption and engage instead with what Steven J. Jackson calls ‘broken world thinking’ and a politics and ethics of care and repair? How do we, as academics in the social sciences and environmental humanities, engage with these planetary realities, and what kinds of state, corporate, citizen, activist and academic responses are unfolding in relation to the multiple dimensions of socio-ecological and climate breakdown?
This colloquium will engage with a range of technoscientific, infrastructural, socio-ecological, communicative, ethical, cultural, political and economic questions thrown up by this epoch we call the Anthropocene/Capitalocene. This will include, but by no means be limited to, engaging with questions about the impacts of renewable energy, conservation projects and ‘salvational technologies’ and techno-scientific fixes (e.g., green hydrogen) that critics believe could end up causing and reproducing socio-environmental damage, inequality, land dispossession and the extractivist logics of what some have referred to as green colonialism and ecological imperialism. It will also invite deep thinking about the role of scientific evidence in the policy, media and activist forms of communication that inform and shape these questions.
The themes we will engage with will be wide ranging, and will include engaging with troubling questions about who is responsible for this planetary crisis, who will suffer the most from its consequences, and how all people can be included in forging collective strategies for survival and adaptation. These are inherently geopolitical questions, because the scientific evidence shows that countries in the global South will be most adversely impacted by the disasters unleashed by climate breakdown – floods, cyclones, storms, droughts, diseases, and heat waves. It is also the case that those countries in the global South which are least responsible for carbon emissions, are also the places with poorer infrastructural systems to protect and buffer their citizens from these climate disasters. Such socio-ecological and infrastructural disparities remind us how historical relations of inequality between the advanced industrialised economies of the global North and the global South continue to be played out in these times of climate breakdown and polycrisis. Against this historical background of socially and ecologically destructive colonial and capitalist development, we will focus on ongoing research on a variety of environmentally related themes in diverse settings.
Researchers and postgraduate research students affiliated with both SARChIs are invited to participate.
Please submit titles and abstracts of your presentation by 18 February 2025 to scicomm@sun.ac.za. We will prepare and circulate a programme by 18 March 2025.
Convenors:
Prof Mehita Iqani (SARChI Science Communication), Stellenbosch University
Prof Steven Robins (SARChI Land, Environment and Sustainable Development), Stellenbosch University