Ep 8 - "Just Urban Futures" with Ashley Dawson

GMU Cultural Studies Colloquium

In the eighth episode of the "Capitalism, Climate Change, and Culture" podcast series from GMU Cultural Studies, Eric Ross talks with Ashley Dawson, who has written about climate change in The Boston Review, The Guardian, In These Times, Jacobin, and elsewhere. He's the author of the books Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change, Extinction: A Radical History, and others. Ross and Dawson discuss what we can learn about climate politics by paying attention to cities and urban social movements.
This podcast series is associated with George Mason University Cultural Studies' Colloquium Series. This year's series is called "Capitalism, Climate Change, and Culture." The industrial revolution liberated human beings from the cycles of nature — or so it once seemed. It turns out that greenhouse gases, a natural byproduct of coal- and petroleum-burning industries, lead to global warming, and that we are now locked into a long warming trend: a trend that will raise sea levels, enhance the occurrence of extreme weather events, and ultimately could threaten food supplies and other vital supports for modern civilization. This podcast series examines the cultural and political-economic dimensions of our ongoing, slow-moving climate crisis. We engage experts from a variety of fields and disciplines to ask questions about capitalism and the environment. How did we get into this mess? How bad is it? Where do we go from here? What sorts of steps might mitigate the damage — or perhaps someday reverse it? At stake are deep questions about humanity’s place in and relationship to nature — and what our systems of governance, production, and distribution might look like in the future.
Learn more about the Cultural Studies Program at GMU: http://culturalstudies.gmu.edu
Learn more about Ashley Dawson on his faculty page: https://www.gc.cuny.edu/Page-Elements/Academics-Research-Centers-Initiatives/Doctoral-Programs/English/Faculty-by-Field/Ashley-Dawson
Learn more about Ashley Dawson on his personal blogsite: https://ashleydawson.info/
Interview: Eric Ross
Production and Editing: Richard Todd Stafford
Colloquium Organizer: Roger Lancaster
Music: Kevin MacLeod "Acid Trumpet," used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.