Kyle Whyte: Kinship, Our Experience of Time, and Environmental Responsibility
C21 Spring Lecture with Kyle Whyte: Kinship, Our Experience of Time, and Environmental Responsibility
April 24 @ 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm
Join the Center for 21st Century Studies for our featured 2024-25 lecture with Kyle Whyte, the George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan.
We are often given mixed signals about the relationship between our responsibility to take action to address climate change and our sense of time. Is there a climate crisis that is so urgent that we must take whatever measures are necessary to lower carbon footprints? Or will buying too much into emotions of urgency generate hasty solutions that actually stymie progress? Some Indigenous traditions offer ethics based on responsibility and kinship that present ways in which time and ethics can be aligned, allowing us to be urgent but moral, and address the physical causes of climate change while fostering solidarity with the communities who experience climate injustice.
Dr. Whyte’s research addresses moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples, the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and science organizations, and problems of Indigenous justice in public and academic discussions of food sovereignty, environmental justice, and the anthropocene. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
The Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) fosters innovative research and community engagement at the intersection of the humanities, arts, and sciences. C21’s theme for 2024-2025 is Slow Knowing: The Pace of Being Human, with programming and sponsored research that calls attention to embodied processes of building and maintaining collective life that resist the fast-paced efficiency models and short attention spans that increasingly define human responses to 21st century social, political, and ecological challenges.
Free street parking available in neighborhoods near venue. Paid parking available at the Union Garage (Lot #22).
Doors open at 5:00pm. Refreshments will be served before and after the talk.
This event is free and open to the public. Prior registration is requested.