Wildfires, coastal flooding, and even COVID. The urgency of finding solutions to climate crisis has never been more apparent. As we experience climate disaster, how do we not succumb to doomsday scenarios, but instead recognize the current “seeds beneath the snow” and imagine the possibilities of climate utopia? What might climate utopia even look like? What forms of resistance will we need to take to create the “expansion of ways of being in the world”? How will current spatial relations (from borders to homeless encampments to prisons) need to be abolished and/or reimagined?
In this Olio, we will explore these questions and more, with Out of the Woods collective, who explores ecological crisis from the perspective of political theory, and Olio mainstay, Lauren Hudson, a geographer and activist. We will begin the conversation around this article, by an Out of the Woods collective member, “The Only Realism: Utopia Within, Utopia Against, Utopia Beyond.”
This event will be live-streamed. Please click here to register for the link to join the event.
Sponsored by Radical May.
We hope you join us for this conversation, which will spark hope amidst the heaviness of the moment.
*This Olio will be a conversation between the Out of The Woods collective & Lauren Hudson*
Lauren Hudson is a peer educator with the Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York, an organization that she and other collective members of SolidarityNYC, a solidarity economy advocacy collective, cofounded. In addition to her organizing work, she is a recent PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center and an adjunct in Africana Studies at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She is also a lecturer with ThinkOlio, were she teaches subjects related to feminist urban geography, and a member of her neighborhood mutual aid group.
Think Olio is here to put the liberation back into the liberal arts. Classically, the liberal arts, were the education considered essential for a free person to take an active part in civic life. To counter a humanities that has been institutionalized and dehumanized we infuse critical thinking, openness, playfulness, and compassion into our learning experience.
A Collaboration with Think Olio and Common Notions Press