Date/Time
Date(s) - Mon 14 April
17:30 - 19:00
2025 De Carle Distinguished Lecture series
Presented by Associate Professor Benjamin McKean (PhD, MA Princeton, BA Harvard)
It is a commonplace across the spectrum of mainstream political philosophy and theory to frame anthropogenic climate change as a global problem. Indeed, “the global” seems like an obvious or even unavoidable category for theorising a political response to climate change. However, others have warned against this approach and called for decolonising global justice, arguing that “the global” often functions to conceal the fact that it is fundamentally a discourse of the Global North in which the Global South exists as victim rather as agent. To evaluate this challenge, Ben pairs indigenous approaches to environmental justice with approaches in the critical theory tradition that endorse the idea of a “global subject.” Reading these traditions together allows to create new understandings of “the global” that incorporate an ecological understanding of its subject, extending beyond the anthropocentrism of the prevailing “global justice” to construct a new materialist and place-based conception of “the global” adequate to averting total disaster.
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About Associate Professor Benjamin McKean
Ben is a political theorist whose research concerns global justice, climate change, populism and the relationship between theory and practice.
Currently at The Ohio State University and formerly a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago, Ben is researching the inadequacy of existing political concepts for addressing climate change. His book, Disorienting Neoliberalism: Global Justice and the Outer Limit of Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2020) argues that people subject to unjust institutions and practices should be disposed to solidarity with others who are also subject to them – even when those relations cross state borders.