Hannah Arendt and the politics of climate change
Facilitator: Lucy Benjamin
10-week module on Thursday evenings, 7-9.30pm, January 16th, 23rd and 30th, February 6th. 13th, 20th and 27th and March 5th, 12th and 19th
Council’s learning resource centre at the City Clean depot, Upper Hollingdean Road, Brighton BN1 7GA. (entrance gates opposite the Hollingbury Pub)
In this module we will turn to one of the most singular thinkers of the 20th century, Hannah Arendt, in order to ‘think’ the crisis of catastrophic climate change. Arendt famously rejected the title philosopher, choosing to position herself as a ‘political theorist.’ Despite this insistence her writings bridge the two disciplines, producing philosophically informed understandings of politics and philosophy grounded by political context. It is this hybridization of politics and philosophy that will situate our reading of her work.
However, given that for Arendt the immediacy of experience and the reality of events structured the course of thinking, in this module we read Arendt and think politics and philosophy in relation to what we might consider the experience of our age: climate change.
The module begins with the assumption that climate change poses political questions; questions of responsibility, rights, access to resources, judgment etc. We then make the further assumption that climate change should be thinkable from within the canon of political philosophy. With this in mind during the course we will reread Hannah Arendt’s work with an ‘environmental eye.’
The course will be divided into four subsections each lasting two weeks. During week one of each subsection we will read an essay by Arendt in order to ‘think’ it in relation to climate change in week two. The structure of the course will be open to student input particularly as we turn to think about environmental issues.