Environment, Consumption, Internationalism

What does international solidarity look like in the face of the climate crisis already unevenly impacting us? How might answers to the ever-pressing question ‘What is to be done?’ differ between Global North and South? How should we understand the contradictions and complicities of living in capitalist society today?

We are pleased to present 'Environment, consumption, internationalism' at the Jackman Humanities Institute (JHI), University of Toronto. The JHI-sponsored Global Marxism working group (2022-2023) has brought together U of T faculty and graduate students for interdisciplinary discussions about theory, international solidarity, colonialism, race, and more. In this end of year online event, we welcome the U of T community and beyond into discussion about climate change, capitalist consumption, and international solidarity.

Guest speaker presentations will be followed by a roundtable discussion with questions from the audience.

Speakers and talk titles:

• Max Ajl (University of Ghent) 'Agrarian Questions South and North: Ecological Planning and Convergence’
• Ying Chen (New School) 'Creating a counter-hegemonic climate change narrative - A view from the Global South'
• Kirstin Munro (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley) 'Waste and consumption in the Global North'

Max Ajl is a senior fellow at the Conflict and Development Studies Department at Ghent University and is an associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment and holds a PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University, where his dissertation was on the Tunisian national liberation struggle and post-colonial planning. His academic articles and reviews on Middle East and North African agriculture and development theory have been published in Agrarian South, Globalizations, Review of African Political Economy, Middle East Report, the Journal of Peasant Studies, and many edited volumes.  His popular writing has appeared in the Guardian, the New Statesman, Viewpoint, al-Akhbar, and Monthly Review. He is an associate editor at Agrarian South, and Journal of Labor and Society, and his book, A People’s Green New Deal, was published by Pluto in 2021.

Ying Chen is Assistant Professor of Economics at the New School. Her work explores the contradictions within capitalism and how they exhibit themselves. Topics she has studied include economic development, labor, and climate change, with a special focus on the global south. She has published in journals including Environment and Development Economics, Economics and Labor Relations Review, Journal of Labor and Society, Review of Radical Political Economics, International Review of Applied Economics, and so on. She was also consulted for the working of the UNCTAD Trade and Development Report 2021.

Kirstin Munro is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in Edinburg, Texas, USA. Her book, The Production of Everyday Life in Eco-Conscious Households: Compromise, Conflict and Complicity, was published by Bristol University Press earlier this year.

Please direct any questions to the organizer, Jasmine Chorley-Schulz.

This is an event by the Global Marxism: Rethinking Marxist Thought in a Counter-Revolutionary Age JHI Working Group.