Talk Title: Beyond the Greenhouse Effect: Climate Change and Social Justice
Vandana Singh, PhD
Professor of Physics and Environment, Framingham State University
April 27, 2024 | 11am-12pm EDT
Watch Vandana Singh’s Talk on YouTube
Summary
Climate Change is part of a complex of global social-environmental problems that pose an existential threat to humanity and the biosphere. Unfortunately, we also live in an age of massive greenwashing, without good evaluative frameworks for so-called solutions. It is imperative that our students are able to think critically and ethically about climate change and climate solutions so that they can be inspired to take wise action. Yet, scholars agree, broadly speaking, that mainstream education has failed us. An important reason for this is that the climate problem transcends conventional educational frameworks. It is a richly complex problem that spans large scales of space and time, it is inherently interdisciplinary and it is centrally concerned with issues of justice and equity. How to embrace these essential aspects despite our siloed education system? This talk describes the development of a justice-centered transdisciplinary pedagogy of climate change in the context of a general physics classroom in which stories serve as jump-off points for explorations at the intersection of science, society and justice.
Bio
Vandana Singh is a theoretical particle physicist by training and a professor of physics and environment at Framingham State University. For the past fifteen years she has been working on a re-visioning of the climate crisis at the nexus of science, society and meaningful action, and has developed an always-in-progress transdisciplinary, justice-centered climate pedagogy for her general physics classes that has wide applicability across disciplines. She leads the Education Working Group of My Climate Risk, a Lighthouse Activity of the World Climate Research Programme, which seeks to make climate science information meaningful and actionable for communities on the ground. She is the author of Teaching Climate Change: Science, Stories, Justice (Routledge, January 2024).