Climate in Crisis

Activism, Apathy, and Responsibility: Social Responses to and Social Causes of the Current Climate Crisis

Abstract Submission:https://humber.ca/tifa/call-proposals

Contact: tifa@humber.ca

Submission Deadline: June 5, 2022

Conference Date: September 23 and 24, 2022

Location: This year’s conference will be virtual. A small conference fee will be charged to help offset production costs.

Hosts: Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences, Humber College, and the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA)

Keynote Speaker: Nikki Sanchez 

Nikki Sanchez is a Pipil and Irish/Scottish academic, land defender, media maker, environmental spokesperson, and decolonization expert. You can see more of her work on the VICELAND series RISE or in her TEDx talk "Decolonization is for Everyone."

She is also an activist, author and educator, as well as the founder and director of Decolonize Together.  

Call for Proposals:

“The future doesn't exist. The only thing that exists is now and our memory of what happened in the past. But because we invented the idea of a future, we're the only animal that realized we can affect the future by what we do today.”

― David Suzuki

In March 1912, an article in Popular Mechanics focused on the remarkable weather of 1911, citing extreme heat across North America and Europe and unprecedented melting of ice in the Arctic. The conclusion? Human-created climate change based largely on an over reliance on coal energy. More than a century later and fundamentally, little has change, with some scientists claiming that we’ve already entered into the sixth mass extinction. 

Over the past century, globalization has led to an interconnectedness and an awareness of the shared effects of climate change, yet hesitancy and outright denialism surrounding climate change have slowed progress, but have also worked to diminish or distract from notions of social responsibility. Societal responsibility has been transferred away from the corporate or systemic to the individual, where action may be simpler, but impact is negligible.  Additionally, despite a rise in awareness of environmental racism and the fact that the most impacted by climate change are those with the least control, frontline action has been left, in many places around the world, to Indigenous land defenders who face increasing violence from the state and ambivalence from the media.

This conference seeks to explore the social challenges faced by the climate crisis, the impacts of climate change denialism, environmental racism, representations of the climate crisis in media and the arts, individual vs. corporate responsibility, and the need for equitable solutions.

THEMES:

·      Activism and Advocacy

·      Animal Welfare

·      Art & Environmentalism

·      Climate Change Education or Environmental Education

·      Carbon Footprints

·      Clean Energy

·      Climate Concern

·      Consumerism

·      Corporate vs Individual

·      Culture and the Environment

·      Doomsday Clock- the Anxiety of Climate Change

·      Economics of the Environment 

·      Environmental Architecture

·      Environmental Disasters

·      Environmental Law

·      Environmental Philosophy

·      Environmental Racism

·      Epidemics and the Environment

·      Film and Environmentalism/Climate Change

·      Gender & Environment

·      Globalization

·      Government Policy

·      Green Spaces & Parks

·      Health and Medicine

·      History of the Climate Crisis

·      History of Fossil Fuels

·      Human Rights

·      Indigenous ways of Knowing, Being, and Doing 

·      Innovations in Climate Change Science

·      International Treaties Past, Present, & Future

·      Intersectional Environmentalism

·      Journalism and Social Media: How We See and Shape the Climate Crisis

·      Land Defense/Land Defenders

·      Literature and Theatre of Environmentalism, Climate Change, Science Fiction, Dystopian Futures

·      Oceans

·      Pollution

·      Poverty or States of Inequity

·      Public Opinion and Influence 

·      Race & Environment

·      Resistance to Climate Change

·      Role of Social Sciences in Climate Change

·      Social Justice

·      Social Responsibility

·      Sustainability 

·      Urban Environments

·      Water

Our conference committee welcomes individual presentation proposals of 300 words, and panel proposals (3 people max) of 900 words, based on any of the above themes. This will be the eighth annual Humber@TIFA interdisciplinary conference held by Humber College’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences in association with the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA), one of the most celebrated literary festivals in the world. TIFA is located at the Harbourfront Centre, one of downtown Toronto’s major cultural and artistic venues.

Submit your proposal online by June 5, 2022: https://humber.ca/tifa/call-proposals