Latest challenges within degrowth – Giorgos Kallis (ICTA-UAB)
Monday 4th July, 12.00-13.30, UAB Campus
This lecture introduces degrowth, as a project of radical socioecological transformation calling for decolonizing the social imaginary from capitalism’s pursuit of endless growth. Degrowth is an advanced reincarnation of the radical environmentalism of the 1970s. This lecture will use Ursula Le Guin’s fantasy world from the novel “The Dispossessed” to advance the theory of degrowth and respond to criticisms that degrowth offers an unappealing imaginary, which is retrogressive, Malthusian, and politically simplistic. I argue instead that degrowth is on purpose subversive; it brings the past into the future and into the production of the present; it makes a novel case for limits without denying that scarcity is socially produced; and it embraces conflict as its constitutive element. Parallels are searched between the fantasy world of Le Guin and actual alternative economies in Catalunya today.
Background reading material:Giorgos Kallis & Hug March (2015) Imaginaries of Hope: The Utopianism of Degrowth, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 105:2, 360-368, DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2014.973803, the link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.973803