How can we bear witness to climate change and how can we create new narratives for planetary education?
In recent decades, the climate crisis has led to four turns in social science, politics and management:
- socio-ecological turn
- transformative turn
- Consciousness-based systemic turn
- relational turn
Sociologist John Urry (2000) proposes an integration of all these turns in the "Planetary Turn" (Szerszynski, 2018) by asking an important question: "Who is the planet?" To answer these questions, we need to know, on the one hand, that our language is not capable of expressing possible answers with linguistic precision. Our cognition and our consciousness are conditioned by our language, as Wittgenstein said: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world". However, this also means that by expanding our language, we can see the world differently or construct it differently. Prof. Dr. Kazuma Matoba therefore suggests expanding the meaning of the personal pronoun "WE" and creating new narratives - new narratives about who this planet is and how we are connected to it.
Adapting to climate change is an evolutionary challenge where we need to understand that we are actually co-creating the future. We think of climate change as a technical problem that has to do with carbon dioxide emissions. But it is about more than that - it is an adaptation challenge that also affects our beliefs, values and worldviews. We should not only consider the practical, technological and behavioral aspects, but also the personal and social aspects. To recognize the blind spot of these aspects, we need new narratives with a new awareness. The lecture series invites scientists and activists who are conceptualizing and practicing new WEs - global, transgenerational and planetary WEs.
The lecture series takes place in conjunction with the SWITCH conference. Participation is possible online (registration via the link) and in presence at the university.