The earth’s climate is destabilising more quickly than models had predicted. Yet governments, corporations, and investors are not doing nearly enough about it. The finance and banking worlds have made a strong bid to control climate policy, sometimes called “green finance,” but research suggests the measures that they deem acceptable will be inadequate. Media discourse is divided, guarded, and ambiguous. Although majorities of the residents of many countries have moved to favour stronger climate action, the most powerful economic and political actors are not escalating their responses.

University researchers around the world have taken the leading role in climate science and in studying related analyses of political, economic, and cultural issues. At the same time, universities have been increasingly marginalized, underfunded, and problematised in recent years. Universities have not been willing or able to support all of the teaching and research that needs doing, so that most countries have small armies of independent scholars and precarious instructors working on their own or building small, autonomous institutions. 

In short, the climate crisis is also a crisis of neoliberal capitalism, and both of these are deepened by a knowledge crisis. Not enough research is funded, or is not of the right kind, or is not properly integrated across cultural, economic, and scientific fields, or is ignored by the public, or refused by governments, or denied by industry, or distorted by the media. Many of us have become fatalistic about these problems in a time when research needs to address them. The papers at this conference aimed to confront this fatalism and address these issues directly.

Participants:

• Marie Aronsson-Storier
  Lecturer in Law at University College Cork

• Elena Baglioni
  Reader in Global Supply Chain Management and Sustainability, QMUL

• Bill Balaskas
  Director, Centre for Practice Research in the Arts, Kingston University

• Stefano Carattini
  Assistant Professor, Georgia State University

• Federico Chicchi
  Associate Professor in Sociology and Business Law, University of Bologna

• Anna Curcio
  Independent Scholar

• Nicholas Cox
  Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies, Leeds Beckett University

• Savannah Cox
  Lecturer in Environment, University of Sheffield

• Serdar M. Değirmencioğlu
  Lecturer in Human Geography, Goethe University Frankfurt

• Emanuele Fantini
  Senior Lecturer in Water Politics & Communication, Delft Institute for Water Education

• Angelika Fortuna
  Program Officer, International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development (INFID)

• Francesca Gagliardi
  Reader in Institutional Economics, University of Hertfordshire

• Kostas Gavroglu
  RCH Founding Member; Emeritus Professor of History of Science, University of Athens

• Athena Hadji
  Faculty Member, DIKEMES-College Year in Athens

• Jane Hindley
  Senior Lecturer, Deputy Director, University of Essex

• Eleanor Jupp
  Senior Lecturer in Social Policy, University of Kent

• John Hogan Morris
  Assistant Professor in Economic Geography, University of Nottingham

• Veronica Marchio
  Independent Researcher, Adjunct Professor of Sociology, University of Parma

• Bryan Umaru Kauma
  Assistant Professor of History, Southwestern University

• Adam Leaver
  Professor of Accounting & Society, University of Sheffield

• Sieglinde Lemke
  Professor of North American Studies, University of Freiburg

• Eric Lybeck
  Senior Lecturer in Education, University of Manchester

• Eric Kushinga Makombe
  Senior Lecturer in Economic History & Development, University of Zimbabwe

• Peter Newell
  Professor of International Relations, University of Sussex

• Michael Nwankpa
  Founding Director, Centre for African Conflict & Development, London

• Izabela Orlowska
  Cross-Cultural Communication Consultant, Berlin

• ‘H’ Patten
  Associate Lecturer in African Caribbean Dance, Goldsmiths University of London

• Andya Paz
  Department of Environmental Science and Policy, Central European University

• Gigi Roggero
  Director of DeriveApprodi’s Input series

• Konstantinos Stylianou
  PhD Graduate (Sociological and Political Sciences), University of Cyprus

• Peter Sutoris
  Assistant Professor of Education and Social Justice, University of York

• Lisa Taylor
  Reader in Cultural Studies and Head of Media, Leeds Beckett University

• Bridget Vincent
  Lecturer in English Literature, Australian National University

• Duncan Wigan
  Professor at the Copenhagen Business School

• Joy White
  Senior Lecturer in Applied Social Sciences, University of Bedfordshire