Date/Time
Date(s) - Wed 22 May
12:00 - 13:00
Location
AM104, Alan MacDiarmid Building, VUW
In the twentieth century, scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds diagnosed a major social fault line – the (usually religious) fundamentalist response to the upheavals of modernity. But fundamentalism is not necessarily tied to modernity: Loftland (2017, 24), for example, writes that the prerequisite of fundamentalism is not ‘a certain level of modernity but a certain psychology of chaos […] it is a claim of reinstated order after a named destabilisation’. Climate change either will, or already has, eclipsed modernisation as the primary destabilising force in contemporary society. This paper explores whether the theories of fundamentalism can explain and help us identify contemporary reactions to climate change and/or what Dr Hancock calls the climate change paradigm. She argues that contemporary forms of climate reaction take remarkably similar form to twentieth-century fundamentalism, because modernism has – so far – successfully contained our understandings of and responses to climate change.
Dr Rosemary Hancock is a senior lecturer and convener of the Religion, Culture and Society Research Focus Area in the Institute for Ethics and Society at the University of Notre Dame Australia. She is a sociologist of religion whose research investigates the complex relationship between religion and politics in contemporary society. Her work focuses on grassroots politics and social movements, especially environmentalism. Rosemary is the Co-Editor of the Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, and Co-Host of the popular sociology podcast Uncommon Sense, produced by the Sociological Review Foundation.
This seminar will be held ‘in person’ and online via: https://vuw.zoom.us/j/96713054564