Climate Wreckage and Indigenous Philosophies

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel puts into conversation contemporary, anarchist, and Indigenous political theory to examine the intersections between colonialism, capitalism, militarism, inequality, and climate wreckage. The papers on the panel highlight the role that western cosmologies have played in both the production of the Anthropocene by settler states and societies and the silencing of Indigenous spiritual orientations by dominant Euro-American images of earth mastery. Drawing on Aztec cosmologies, Native Hawaiian concepts of bio-climatic relations, and West African traditions of earth jurisprudence, the papers explore the promise of Indigenous cosmologies and legal philosophies to promote new ways of organizing political life and society, including community and kin networks of mutual aid and care and existential orientations to come to terms with climate wreckage in a world not predisposed to human mastery.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Aztec Cosmology and Contemporary Climate Wreckage - William E. Connolly, Johns Hopkins University

• The Maui Wildfires - Kathy E. Ferguson, University of Hawaii, Manoa

• Earth Jurisprudence and the Politics of African Eco-Humanism - Anatoli Ignatov, Appalachian State University

• Beyond the Human-Nature Divide: The Rights of Nature and Political Membership - Joseph Rodriguez, Duke University

Chair

• Elisabeth Robin Anker George Washington University

Discussant

• Smita A. Rahman DePauw University