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Description:

Session Title: “Confronting Climate Coloniality”

Organizer: Dr Farhana Sultana, Syracuse University, sultanaf@syr.edu

Co-sponsors: Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group, Political Geography Specialty Group, Human Dimensions of Global Change Specialty Group, Development Geographies Specialty Group, Caribbean Geographies Specialty Group, Indigenous Geographies Specialty Group

Session Description:
The connections between climate change and legacies of colonialism have been of greater interest to scholars in recent years. Legacies of imperial violence live on not only exacerbating environmental degradations but increased climate-induced disasters experienced by variously racialized populations who are disproportionately made vulnerable and disposable in the process. Climate coloniality is perpetuated through neoliberalism, racial capitalism, development interventions, education, training & the media. Decolonizing climate needs to address the interlinked complexities of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, international development, and geopolitics that contribute to the reproduction of ongoing colonialities in atmospheres of violence. Drawing emergent scholarship such as the complexities and endurances of climate coloniality (Sultana 2022), climate reparations (Taiwo 2022), worldmaking (Ghosh 2021), Indigenous resistance (Simpson 2021), and numerous related bodies of scholarship, this session interrogates further the decolonization of climate coloniality in critical geographical and interdisciplinary dialogues across scales and continents along discursive, material, political, and embodied pathways. Some questions for consideration, but not limited to these, are the following: What are the manifestations of climate coloniality in different contexts and what constitutes confronting it? What collective/collaborative processes can be envisioned and fostered for a decolonized climate justice? How do we understand reparations, worldmaking, and healing in the current conjuncture? In what ways can reparative relationships to human and more-than-human communities be reconstituted, both near and far? What power relations are involved in desiring, designing, creating, and sustaining relationalities and resistances, and at what levels? How can we theorize/teach/grow resplendent climate revolutions of being otherwise?

References:
Ghosh, A. (2021). The Nutmeg’s curse: Parables for a planet in crisis. University of Chicago Press.
Simpson, L. (2021). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minnesota Press.
Sultana, F (2022). The Unbearable Heaviness of Climate Coloniality. Political Geography. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102638
Taiwo, O. (2022). Reconsidering reparations: Worldmaking in the case of climate crisis. Oxford University Press.

Non-Presenting Participants