This week we have a talk from our new EH visiting fellow, Dr Cheryl Lousley, on the origins of and ideas behind 'sustainability'.
4.30pm, Thursday 3rd of May
Room 3.54, 50 George Square
Imagined Worlds, Democratic Forms: The Public Hearings of the World Commission on Environment and Development
The talk will discuss how an imagined world was conjured and contested through performative encounters at the public hearings of the 1983-1987 World Commission on Environment and Development, and their extensive citation in its final report, Our Common Future. The paper extends and complicates the scholarship on national imaginaries and on global environmentalisms to argue that worlds also form and fracture through the desires and practices of aspirational subjects and their relations to institutions of governing. It describes the commission and its landmark proposal for sustainable development when in the process of authoring and authorizing a particular world imaginary through the aesthetic and performative forms associated with liberal democracy. The political speeches of participants show the commission, its national hosts, and its democratic forms under scrutiny and contestation, with others, too, making claims on the world and on the institutions through which the political-ecological conditions for living a good life are managed, distributed, and disrupted, and their justice adjudicated.
Bio:
Dr. Cheryl Lousley is Associate Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Lakehead University Orillia, Canada. She is currently a Visiting Research Fellow in the Environmental Humanities at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh. She has held a Fulbright Research Chair in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Carson Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich. Her work appears in several landmark collections of ecocriticism, including The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism; Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches; The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 1993-2003; and Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context. She is the founding editor of the Environmental Humanities book series with Wilfrid Laurier University Press and the Canadian editor for Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities.