Session Information
22 SES 04 B, Academics and Governance
Paper Session
Contribution
In this essay, we offer a temporal lens to open new ways of conceptualizing decarbonizing academic work. While there has been a growing literature on climate justice and higher education (HE), remaining undertheorized is the temporal aspects of decarbonizing academic work. While some have critically examined the role of HE in climate change, through interrogating its purpose, curricular reform, and the role of students and faculty in the current climate crisis (Grady-Benson & Sarathy, 2016; McCowan, 2023; Rae et al., 2022; Reyes-Garcia et al., 2022; Stein et al., 2023; Williams & Love, 2022), others have interrogated the climate change consequences of internationalization of HE (McCowan, 2023; Shields, 2019; Shields & Lu, 2023). Most of these discussions have taken place in the context of Global North, and rarely apply a temporal lens. We draw on our experiences and research on Bangladeshi academia, as an entry point to explore intersecting questions of climate politics, academic work, and a global South context for climate justice.
We argue that a temporal lens helps us illuminate the temporal politics underlying the possibilities and challenges of contemporary decarbonizing academic work globally. By temporal politics, we mean the inherent social-power relations, assumptions, and/or biases of social action (i.e., advocacy, decision-making), related to the way we make sense of, connect to, and experience time, that goes beyond, but also includes clock time. As such, we offer a temporal political reading of the common solutions offered in decarbonizing academic work, namely reconsidering a) aeromobility, b) digitization, and c) futurity.
We believe a temporal lens is pertinent in the debates about HE’s role in climate justice for several reasons. First, we echo Facer’s (2023) suggestion that we need to ask temporal questions in the climate crisis debates, such as: “Who is telling the time in this situation and how?... What are the histories and habits that shape my own temporal assumptions, where do these come from, and what sustains them?” (p. 64). As such, we can raise tough questions about how the problems and solutions towards climate change are embedded in dominant paradigms of knowledge (Stein et al., 2023), including time. Second, climate change is an unfolding temporal phenomenon, and not a singular event, which interconnects larger macros processes with the everyday, including academic life. Finally, incorporating a temporal lens further helps nuance the role of HE in the climate crisis by illuminating the ontological variance in framing the climate crisis, the inequities in Global North/South academic mobility, and the role of clock-time in academic work.
Method
Drawing on recent scholarship on decolonial and Global South perspectives on climate justice (Bandera, 2022; Guerro, 2023; Sultana, 2022; Whyte, 2018), literature on climate justice and higher education, and our research/experiences in Bangladesh, we aim to tease out the temporal politics underlying the possibilities and challenges of decarbonizing academic work. Despite our similar Bangladeshi origins, our experiences with the frontiers of climate change are significantly different due to our class, citizenship, and/or position in the global academic hierarchy. We draw on narratives to illuminate the contrasting temporal standpoints we bring in terms of climate crisis, academic work, spatial mobility, and use of technology. Our Bangladeshi standpoint is significant, because the latter is considered the most adversely affected nation due to increasing sea levels and thus regarded as a “hotspot” of climate vulnerability and action (Paprocki, 2021a). Such a climate status is used domestically by Bangladesh’s own “climate mafia,” a collective of researchers, policy makers, and advocates whose prominent role in global climate negotiations draws attention to the threat of rising seas particularly to the country’s vulnerable coastline (Paprocki, 2021). Consequently, Bangladeshi climate-related academic research mostly focuses on climate change indicators, climate change impact, resilient measures, and adaptation strategies (Ahmed & Khan, 2023; Hoque et al., 2019).
Expected Outcomes
Most discussions about decarbonizing work focus on academic researchers’ and students’ mobility, such as travel for conferences, data collection, or study abroad (Williams & Love, 2022). Many agree that travel is the major contributor to carbon emissions from academic research (Reyes-Garcia et al., 2022; Tseng et al., 2022). Others suggest that digitization of academic research and collaboration may be a move forward in decarbonizing academic work (Pasek, 2023; Reyes-Garcia et al., 2022). Finally, while decarbonizing efforts in academia have focused on questions of mobility and digitization in academic work, the ontological framings of futurity mobilizing climate justice efforts remains unpacked Evidently, such mobility, digitization, and futurity framing discussions have ignored the temporal dimension. First, A temporal politics of decarbonizing academic work needs to interrogate the intersecting roles of coloniality and geopolitics of knowledge informing the necessity of academic aeromobility for some compared to others. A temporal lens would foreground the directionality, physical distances, and myriad borders (cultural, linguistic and relational) one needs to cross to feel seen, validated and belonging in the global academic community. Second, while digitalization may free us from travel, increase the speed of our work and/or collaborations across borders, it also requires larger investments in temporal digital infrastructure not available to many. Furthermore, a temporal lens foregrounds the lives of actants in our digital methods (i.e., clock time, our devices), and the temporal consequences of digital academic work on our embodied being. Finally, a temporal politics would raise questions about the Gregorian calendar, teleological, and dystopian standpoints underlying climate policy solutions. Such solutions presume that all humans embody a universal trajectory and are equally implicated or impacted by the climate crisis. Instead, a temporal politics suggests interrogating whose temporal assumptions inform such climate change narratives, and more importantly, what they obscure.
References
Ahmed, S., & Khan, M. A. (2023). Spatial overview of climate change impacts in Bangladesh: a systematic review. Climate and Development, 15(2), 132-147. Bandera, G. (2022). How climate colonialism affects the Global South. Fair Planet. https://www.fairplanet.org/story/how-climate-colonialism-affects-the-global-south/ Facer, K. (2023). Possibility and the temporal imagination. Possibility Studies & Society 1(1–2), pp. 60–66. Grady-Benson, J., & Sarathy, B. (2016). Fossil fuel divestment in US higher education: student-led organising for climate justice. Local Environment, 21(6), 661-681. Guerrero, D. G. (2023). Colonialism, climate change and climate reparations. Global Justice Now. https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/blog/2023/08/colonialism-climate-change-and-climate-reparations/ Hoque, M. Z., Cui, S., Lilai, X., Islam, I., Ali, G., & Tang, J. (2019). Resilience of coastal communities to climate change in Bangladesh: Research gaps and future directions. Watershed Ecology and the Environment, 1, 42-56. McCowan, T. (2023). Internationalisation and climate impacts of higher education: Towards an analytical framework. Journal of Studies in International Education 27(4), pp. 567–585. Paprocki, K. (2021a). The climate crisis is a colonial crisis. Shuddhashar FreeVoice (শুদ্ধস্বর). https://shuddhashar.com/the-climate-crisis-is-a-colonial-crisis/ Pasek, A. (2023). On Being Anxious About Digital Carbon Emissions. Social Media+ Society, 9(2), 20563051231177906. Rae, C.L., Farley, M., Jeffery, K.J., & Urai, A.E. (2022). Climate crisis and ecological emergency: Why they concern (neuro)scientists, and what we can do. Brain and Neuroscience Advances 6, p. 239821282210754. Reyes-García, V., Graf, L., Junqueira, A.B., & Madrid, C. (2022). Decarbonizing the academic sector: Lessons from an international research project. Journal of Cleaner Production 368. Shields, R. (2019). The sustainability of international higher education: Student mobility and global climate change. Journal of Cleaner Production 217, pp. 594–602. Shields, R., & Lu, T. (2023). Uncertain futures: climate change and international student mobility in Europe. Higher Education. Stein, S., Andreotti, V., Ahenakew, C., Suša, R., Valley, W., Huni Kui, N., ... & McIntyre, A. (2023). Beyond colonial futurities in climate education. Teaching in Higher Education, 28(5), 987-1004. Sultana, F. (2022). The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality. Political Geography 99. Tseng, S.H.Y., Lee, C., & Higham, J. (2022). Managing academic air travel emissions: Towards system-wide practice change. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment 113. Whyte, K.P. (2018). Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(1–2), pp. 224–242. Williams, J., & Love, W. (2022). Low-carbon research and teaching in geography: Pathways and perspectives. Professional Geographer 74(1), pp. 41–51.
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