The Eco-Age Research Group at the University of Graz is delighted to announce a guest lecture by Prof. Claudia J. Ford, PhD.
The event is hosted in collaboration with the DAAD-funded research project European Societal Challenges in German Culture: Exploring Ageing and Climate Change in Tandem
Abstract:
The climate emergency raises challenging questions about human behaviour with strong moral and ethical dimensions. Planetary thinking, as opposed to predominant global political preoccupations, marks a paradigm shift. A shift that requires our understanding of this moment in Earth history as a time to recognise that humans play a critical species-specific role in this environmental transition. We have unique responsibilities for accomplishing the task of making sacred our ideas about nature and the human, for deeply understanding our relationships to ourselves, each other, nature, and the cosmos - our zoetic entanglements - a balance of care that is essential to the well-being of the whole living network. In order to guide human society to establish an ethical framework of environmental care this lecture examines African American women's wisdom at the intersections of ecology, culture, and spirituality and as revealed within African American literature.
African American identity and philosophy have been fired through the alchemy of oppression, and African American culture has needed to address all of the dimensions of human consciousness and existence - physical, spiritual, emotional, intellectual - in order to thrive. Unique to Black culture is the awareness that something important happens when the collective is forced to forge an identity in the kiln of persecution and survival. African American wisdom encompasses an epistemology of existential persistence and flourishing. Our current environmental emergency is fundamentally about survival and so there is a match here - African American environmental wisdom is urgently needed at precisely this time.
Grandmother wisdom is the bridge between the philosophical and conceptual legacies of Black women ancestors and the ambitions of current and future human generations. While there is no doubt that we are living in a world far different than our ancestors, yet we need ancestral and elder legacies and insights to manage a transition to new regenerative behaviours, attitudes, and actions that will maintain a place for humans on Earth. This lecture examines these legacies and traditions within insights gleaned from an ecocritical study of selected texts of African American literature.
Grandmother wisdom is a paean to the Earth knowledge of African American grandmothers, a manifesto of an emergent environmental paradigm of planetary thinking, and a manual for humanity's role and responsibilities within a just, sustainable, and ethical environmental worldview.
Find the flyer here.