Is COVID-19 a Capitalocene Challenge?
Public Climate School Talk
06.05.2020 at 13:00
Learn more about environmental justice!
The Rachel Carson Center actively participated in this year’s digital Public Climate School in the end of May. For one week, cross-disciplinary courses were being adapted thematically and opened for everyone to learn about challenges connected to our changing climate. The aim was and still is to give the climate crisis the importance it requires. Details can be found here: https://www.studentsforfuture-muc.de/
Former RCC Fellow Jenia Mukherjee spoke on: "Is COVID-19 a Capitalocene Challenge?"
About Prof. Dr. Mukherjee:
Jenia Mukherjee is Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. Her research interest spans across environmental history, political ecology and urban studies. She is the author of Blue infrastructures: Natural Ecology, Political History and Urban Development in Kolkata (Springer Nature, 2020) for which she received the Carson Writing Fellowship from the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich.
About the talk:
Working at the intersections between environmental humanities urban studies, the speaker will contextualize COVID 19 as the 'Capitalocene' challenge, arguing why this framework can provide a better edge to understand global pandemics. The larger understanding that COVID 19 is a 'neo-liberal disease' and 'wicked problem', deeply embedded in the material and cultural fabric of our times, will then drive the second part of the lecture focusing on the Indian cities, the talk will demonstrate how densely packed urban environments with weak infrastructures and utilities can turn the corona hazard into a disaster. The most marginalized, inhabiting 'informal' settlements will be the worst sufferers from the outbreak of coronavirus with continued and spiral effect during the pre-outbreak, outbreak and post-outbreak stages.
Slides and References
Please feel free to have a look at the presentation's slides or related references that Jenia shared with us!
