CEP Divisional Webinar: Eco-Anxiety and Climate Urgency in the Mother City
Eco-Anxiety and Climate Urgency in the Mother City
About this Webinar
Date: 8 May 2025
Time:
- EST 10:00 – 11:00
- SAST 16:00 – 17:00
Platform: Teams
This talk examines eco-anxiety in relation to urban conflagrations in South Africa and interconnected sites beyond its borders. Fire, as a material and symbolic force, is rapidly reordering urban life across the globe. From California to Australia to Brazil, the illuminate effects of flame and rising smoke have become the dramatic face of planetary warming. In fire-prone locales, like Cape Town, state institutions, civic groups, scientists, and private entities are increasingly shaping climate policy debates through advertising campaigns, “green” research and development, and large-scale infrastructure projects. What unites these phenomena, I argue, is efforts by various actors to heighten or deescalate, but ultimately draw from the economically and politically productive power of fear over insecure and changing environments.
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Kerry Chance is a Professor of Social Anthropology at UiB in Norway, and a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow at The Sorbonne. Her research focuses on the politics of urban ecology and the sociocultural dynamics of climate change, particularly in South Africa and the United States. Chance is the P.I. of The Habitable Air Project (habitableair.org), which examines climate change from the perspective of unequal distributions of air pollution. She has published multiple articles and book chapters, as well as a monograph titled Living Politics in South Africa’s Urban Shacklands (The University of Chicago Press 2018). She has a forthcoming book, which is titled Eco-Anxiety and Climate Urgency in the Mother City and an edited volume, which is titled Habitable Air: Urban Inequality in the Time of Climate Change.