The Contextualising Climate Crisis Series

Stuart Hall may not have tackled issues around climate change using the same language that has developed over the last twenty to thirty years but it’s interesting to think about some of the questions his scholarship helps us pose about its mediation: How is the climate crisis represented? On whose terms is the crisis communicated? Where are the dominant narratives around climate change centred? From which direction are dissenting voices interrupting dominant narratives? Hall gives us the conceptual tools necessary to locate the contradictions in discourses around climate change and to develop deeper and more inclusive understandings of the catastrophe facing us all.

The Contextualising Climate Crisis series provides a counter-narrative to dominant mediations of the crisis. It seeks to complicate top-down approaches to circumventing climate change – championed by the political and business elite of the global north – to contextualise the crisis within a history of colonisation, foreign policy, global economic disparities, and racialised injustices. The aim isn’t to victimise those most impacted by the crisis, rather the series is designed to provide a people’s history of climate change that centres the political agency of those most affected by it, and to highlight the longstanding traditions of resisting climate antagonisms and colonisation simultaneously.

We will be publishing interventions from the Contextualising Climate Crisis series on a fortnightly basis.

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Curated and edited by Orsod Malik.