Just Futures: How to Think, Compose and Live?

NICA Core Course by Toni Pape | 6 EC | Thursdays from 8 April through 13 May 2021, 3-5 pm.

The COVID-19 crisis has upset our lives in many unforeseen ways. That is also because this crisis has aggravated and highlighted various and interrelated systemic problems and injustices. We understand that the public health of our societies, environmental destruction and the climate emergency, extractive economies and the unjust distribution of wealth, migration streams and right-wing protectionism are all interconnected. That means that, in order to address these issues, we also need think them together. That is what this course will attempt to do. A guiding question is: How can we as humanities scholars contribute to the necessary task of reassembling the environmental, social and mental ecologies?

Environmental, social and mental: These are Felix Guattari’s Three Ecologies. Starting from this text, we will explore various proposals for acknowledging and thinking complexity: transversality, relationality, intersectionality, systems theory. The specific texts and other materials that we will study are going to be selected by the collective of students taking this course. (A list of suggestions will be provided by the instructor.) These texts will come from the fields of environmental humanities, intersectional social and cultural studies, queer theory, political and economic theory, and others.

Register: please send an email to nica@hum.leidenuniv.nl before March 15 2021. Please be sure to specify your master program and university.