Have you ever wondered if a key driver of global climate change might be the preponderance of scalding hot takes emanating from our college campuses? It’s a fair question.
On a related note, the MIT Global Studies and Languages department hosted a lecture Monday to discuss the question, “Is Islamophobia accelerating global warming?”
The lecture, by Lebanese-Australian professor Ghassan Hage, was meant to examine “the relation between Islamophobia as the dominant form of racism today and the ecological crisis.” The description posted online contains a lot of big words, but is difficult to translate into common English:
[The lecture] looks at the three common ways in which the two phenomena are seen to be linked: as an entanglement of two crises, metaphorically related with one being a source of imagery for the other and both originating in colonial forms of capitalist accumulation. The talk proposes a fourth way of linking the two: an argument that they are both emanating from a similar mode of being, or enmeshment, in the world, what is referred to as ‘generalised domestication.’
Hage is the author of several books, including White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, and a forthcoming work titled, Is Islamophobia Accelerating Global Warming?
According to his lecture bio, Hage specializes in “the comparative anthropology of nationalism, multiculturalism, diaspora and racism and on the relation between anthropology, philosophy and social and political theory,” whatever that means.
