[SydPhil] Philosophy @ UNSW: Prof. David Schlosberg, "Theorizing Environmental Justice, " Tuesday 9 October

[Joanne Faulkner]

Date:               Tuesday 9 October
Time:              1 p.m.
Venue:           Morven Brown 308B, University of NSW
                        (map reference C20: (1.7MB)<http://www.facilities.unsw.edu.au/Maps/pdf/kensington.pdf>)

Professor David Schlosberg (Sydney)

Theorizing Environmental Justice: The Evolution of a Discourse
The idea of environmental justice has been a central concern for academics in a range of disciplines, and both the concept and its coverage have expanded substantially in the past two decades. Clearly, the discourse of environmental justice has broadened in scope far beyond its initial application to inequities in the distribution of environmental risk, and in this talk I examine this development in three key ways. First, I explore how the early work on environmental justice pushed beyond simple boundaries: it challenged the very notion of “environment,” examined multiple reasons for the construction of injustice, and illustrated the potential of varied and pluralistic conceptions of social justice. More recently, there has been a spatial expansion of the use of the term, horizontally into a broader range of issues, vertically into examinations of the truly global nature of environmental injustices, and conceptually to the human relationship with the nonhuman world. Further, I argue that extension of the environmental justice frame to climate change and sustainable materialism moves a conception of environmental justice into a new realm – where environment and nature are understood to create the conditions for social justice. Finally, I close with a discussion of the evolving relationship between environmental justice practice and academic theorizing.

David Schlosberg is Professor ofEnvironmental Politics in the Department of Government and International Relations, the University of Sydney. He is the author of Defining Environmental Justice (Oxford 2007), and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society (Oxford 2011). He is in the process of co-authoring a book on The Climate-Challenged Society (forthcoming from Oxford in 2013).


Coordinator:
Dr Joanne Faulkner, j.faulkner at unsw.edu.au<mailto:%20j.faulkner at unsw.edu.au>
School of Humanities



Dr Joanne Faulkner
ARC DECRA Research Fellow
School of Humanities
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Room 338, Morven Brown Building
University of New South Wales
Kensington, NSW 2052
Australia

j.faulkner at unsw.edu.au
+61 2 9385 2287
http://hist-phil.arts.unsw.edu.au/staff/joanne-faulkner-633.html
Co-Government/Institutional Representative, Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy: http://www.ascp.org.au
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