Mecila
07 Jun

[2022] Making Sense of the Post-Covid World: Continuities and Changes

Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago)

Online

About the event

Joint Lecture Series
Making Sense of the Post-Covid World: Continuities and Changes

26 April 2022 – 19 July 2022
Tuesdays 1:00 p.m. (Rio de Janeiro), 6:00 p.m. (Berlin and Hamburg)

The pandemic has produced ambivalent consequences for social life. Intersectional inequalities, combining, class, ethno-racial, citizenship, and gender inequalities, both between and within countries, grew during the pandemic and became even more difficult to be mitigated in the post-covid world. At the same time, the global virus has irrefutably revealed the high level of interdependency between different social groups, world regions, as well as between human and nonhuman living beings. However, this did not lead to more solidarity at the national and global level as individualistic and antagonistic responses to the pandemic have created and exacerbated divisions and divides. At the same time, these glaring problems came to the fore and demands to tackle them have grown.

This series of lectures seeks to discuss these ambivalent and long-lasting effects of the pandemic on societies: What has been the impact on social inequality and how does this affect the transformation prospects especially of poor countries? What is the impact of the global virus on world politics? How have the pandemic affected the sense of solidarity at the local, national, and global level? How does the global experience of living with and fighting the pandemic affect the treatment of issues concerning the planet’s common future, such as climate change?

To address these questions, the Institute for Social and Political Studies (IESP/Rio de Janeiro), the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (HIS/ Hamburg) and the Institute of Latin American Studies (LAI /FU Berlin) have invited eight experts from different fields of social sciences to give digital lectures followed by debates with the audience. The lectures will take place between April and July 2022 and will be interposed by internal preparatory sessions at each of the organizing institutes. The series of events is funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation within the framework of the Anneliese Meier Research Award conferred to Prof. Domingues, one of the convenors of this lecture series.

7 June 2022:
On Earth Ethic (Q&A Session), Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago)

 In his book “The climate history in planetary age” (Chicago Univ. Press, 2021), Dipesh Chakrabarty discusses the implications of the Anthropocene und suggests the distinction of two perspectives: the anthropocentric and expansionist, global approach and the planetary perspective, which decenters the human. According to him “The COVID-19 pandemic is the most recent and tragic illustration of how the expanding and accelerating processes of globalization can trigger changes in the much longer-term history of life on the planet”. In this Q & A session, Dipesh Chakrabarty will answer questions asked by the convenors and the audience about the book and his assessment of “earth ethic”.

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Civilization at the University of Chicago. He is the recipient of 2014 Toynbee Prize and of the 2019 Tagore Memorial Prize, awarded by the government of West Bengal, India.

Registrations via zoom.