Waking up to the planetary health emergency webinar series - Webinar 2

Round and round – can the economy be more like biology?

Professor Peter Hopkinson, Professor in Circular Economy and Co-Director Exeter Centre for the Circular Economy, University of Exeter 

Peter Hopkinson joined the University of Exeter Business School in 2017 where he is Co-Director of the Exeter Centre for the Circular Economy. Prior to this he was Director of the at the University of Bradford School of Management Ecoversity initiative, a whole institutional programme to embed sustainability into the research, teaching and operational performance of the University. This involved the design and build of a new £5M BREEAM outstanding Centre as a home for Ecoversity and circular economy activity. Since 2009, Peter also led the University’s strategic partnership with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) as a Global Pioneer for Circular Economy. In 2014 he established the world’s first MBA in Circular economy. In parallel he created a Global on-line Masterclass – An introduction to Circular Economy for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation CE100 and Global Partners which ran for 5 years and attracted over 1000 participants. During this time Peter worked closely with the EMF to translate the principles of circular economy into multiple research and educational contexts including EPSRC and Innovate UK grants, policy and industrial sector application and c-suite, postgraduate, undergraduate and civic society courses and workshops.

Abstract to be confirmed.

What can society learn from the past?

Professor Amanda Power, Sullivan Clarendon Associate Professor in History, St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford

Amanda Power is an historian of religion, power and intellectual life in medieval Europe. She has been involved in developing the field of global medieval history, and new approaches to historical study that speak to the concerns of the mounting climate and environmental crisis. She is currently working on a monograph, Medieval Histories of the Anthropocene, which explores questions concerning the relations between religion, power and the construction of public rationality in the building of medieval states across Eurasia. She is interested in how these centralising processes consciously dislocated humans from local ecosystems and specific and sustainable practices, while creating powerful and enduring narratives about civilisation, barbarism, imperialism and the use of resources. A related, partly collaborative, series of projects ask about the purposes and the future of the historical discipline, and of Humanities and Social Sciences more generally, in the politically, economically and ecologically unstable period that we are now entering. This includes the new ‘Climate Crisis Thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences’ network.

Learning outcomes

• The planetary emergency is a product of human ways of thinking and acting, and change can’t come without bringing expertise from humanities into building our understanding and strategies.
• History is crucial, because the current situation has been in the making for millennia. Our concepts and ideological structures can be traced back to the earliest states, and the systematic eradication over time of other forms of knowledge and ways of living.
• Medieval discourses of apocalypse and salvation, of universal truth, now translated into large-scale disaster-based imagery and the domination of discussion by ‘the science’, have limited our capacity to think of climate emergency on the local, embodied scale, and therefore to see it as part of our lives and futures.
• Seeing how our entrenched ways of thinking were historically contingent may help us to develop more productive approaches to the human problems we face.

Riptide volume 13: Climate Matters

Climate Matters is the Riptide Journal’s thirteenth volume and was produced and published to coincide with the launch of the ‘Waking up to the planetary health emergency’ 2020 webinar series. A burning issue of our time – the climate crisis – is the central theme of this collection of short stories, poetry, images and science writing. Many of the contributors ponder the links between our relentless drive to consume, our disrespect for the natural world and its disastrous effect on the climate and the survival of humanity. In a range of ways they question the role that capitalism plays and the need for a redefinition of what constitutes a good life. COVID-19’s appearance during the selection process means the pandemic and issues of health – both individual and planetary – play their part in the whole.

Download a pdf copy of this publication here.

River

Written, illustrated and read by Corinna Wagner. A link to a reading of River can be found here.

Corinna Wagner is an Associate Professor in Literatures and Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. Corinna’s areas of interest and expertise span the body, art and anatomy, history of photography, medicine and the arts, Victorian and gothic literature, realism and naturalism, detective novels, architectural design, architectural and documentary photography, body studies and critical theory (especially Michel Foucault), theories of visuality, affect theory, uses of the past and Victorian medievalism, urban design, water and the Anthropocene.

Recording

A recording of this session can be found on the GSI YouTube Channel.