Events

IRCPL’s Religion and Climate series is animated by calls to reimagine human relationships with and responsibilities to the environment in an age of planetary crisis. As the impact of climate change is increasingly but unevenly felt, religion is emerging as a site of epistemological doubt, struggle, and possibility. This series explores the cosmological underpinnings that shape diverse understandings of the environment and examine how religious subjects react to and act upon the ecological upheavals they face, challenging exclusively technocratic and secular responses to the climate crisis.

The series involves four events structured around the elements—Earth, Water, Fire, and Air—each of which will take one element as a lens for engaging with specific climate struggles and the religious debates they ignite. In the final event, an online program on the theme of “Air,” Sophie Chao (University of Sydney) and Nikita Simpson (SOAS, University of London) will discuss their work on climate change, atmospherics and spirits in West Papua, India, and the U.K. This conversation will explore both the religious dimensions of air and atmospheres in these contexts, and the ways contemporary climate change emerges out of longer histories of environmental destruction.