17326

WiSe 21/22: Greenwashing the Critical Zone

Margitta Rouse

Information for students

This seminar is taught in a hybrid way. Sessions alternate weekly between online meetings and on-campus meetings. The meeting in week 2 (November 1st) is held on campus (JK 31/288). The meeting in week 3 (November 11th) is held online. Students who would still like to join this class are very welcome. Please send an email to m.rouse@fu-berlin.de to receive a brief update.

Comments

The term “critical zone” is a geological concept referring to the Earth’s outer skin: the space in which all life unfolds. Transferred to the humanities by anthropologist Bruno Latour, the term now refers to both the ground we inhabit and the space in which human communication and interaction takes place. Activists and the media remind us daily that we need to revise our ways of living dramatically since we ourselves, the humans, have become a natural force so immense that we are able to change the Earth’s climate and its ecosystems with catastrophic effects for all planetary life. The impact of our actions is critical to a degree that the geological epoch we find ourselves in is in the process of acquiring its own name: ‘the anthropocene’. Scientists have been alerting us to the geologically detrimental force of our carbon-based cultures for decades. Yet many only now become conscious that too little was done when there was still time to act. While there is still time to act now, time is running out. How did we get into this temporal mess? Thinking of the cultural ‘zones’ we live in as geologically ‘critical’, points towards some answers, as we (re-)define our understanding of terms such as ‘culture’, ‘nature’, ‘time’, ‘activism’, ‘action’ and ‘non-action’. In this seminar we will do so by focusing on some of the cultural mechanisms commonly identified as ‘greenwashing’. ‘Eco-friendly’, ‘green’, ‘environmentally sustainable’, ‘ecologically mindful’, ‘earth-conscious’, ‘environmentally responsible’, ‘planetfriendly’, ‘eco-smart’, and even ‘eco-elegant’ are only some of the buzzwords that create the schizophrenic cultural spaces that signal that it is fine to carry on doing what we know is wrong to do. How have the arts, entertainment media and also highly prestigious cultural institutions such as theaters and museums alerted us to the climate crisis while also greenwashing it? Ultimately, this seminar will also ask: How did the field of cultural studies address as well as greenwash the climate emergency, how is it implicated in it, and what is the way forward? Further information is soon available on Blackboard. close