ETHNOGRAPHIC AGITATIONS
on the horizon of emergent global climate governance
Dr. Richard Widick
International Institute of Climate Action and Theory
Visiting Research Scholar, Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies
Sponsored by the Orfalea Center Interdisciplinary Research Hub on Energy, Climate, and Sustainability
Tuesday, May 19, 2015 — 1:00 PM
Venue: SSMS 2135
With the 21st meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) just six months away, in this talk I look back on four years of participatory observation inside the UN climate talks and ask this question: what can we expect from the Paris talks–in terms of the new treaty, its presently bracketed human rights language, its controversial financial mechanisms, and civil society participation both inside and outside the negotiating halls?
Bio:
Richard Widick holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he lectured on theory, culture, media, globalization, social movements and environment before coming to the Orfalea Center. He is the author of Trouble in the Forest: California’s Redwood Timber Wars (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), an ethnography, cultural analysis, and 150 year social history of the US colonization and industrialization of California’s northern redwood region—a history of the Indian wars and labor trouble that set the legal, social and ecological conditions for converging peoples, labor and environmental movements in the present era of globalization. In new research aimed at further integrating global studies and cultural sociology with media and environmental theory, Widick scales up his institutional analysis of US culture to the international scene of western modernity and the UN climate negotiations. In preparation of a new manuscript—Climate of Empire: Inside the Struggle over Global Climate Governance—he has conducted participatory fieldwork and research videography inside the annual Conferences of the Parties (COPs) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, where he has represented the University of California as an official UN Observer Delegate with collaborator John Foran (sociology, UCSB) for the past several years (COP 17, Durban, South Africa, 2011; COP 18 Doha, Qatar, 2012; and COP 19, Warsaw, Poland, 2013, Lima, Peru, December 2014, documenting the struggle over the UN’s next universal climate treaty to be adopted at COP 21 in Paris, 2015. Widick and Foran are founders and co-directors of The International Institute of Climate Action & Theory (IICAT), and publicize their climate-related work at iicat.org. With Patrick Bond (University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa), Michael Dorsey (Joint Center for Political and Economic Study, Washington, DC), Hilal Elver (UCSB), and Richard Falk (UCSB), they participate in the policy and film research work of the Orfalea Center’s Transnational Politics and Social Movements of Climate Justice Research Cluster.