Climate Change's Forensic Imaginary: Fossil Capitalism and the Pursuit of Justice
The language of criminal justice has long suffused climate change discourse.
Climate change has been described as a crime scene whose “culprits” remain at large, as well as an agent of violence in its own right, whose “fingerprints” can be detected on specific disasters. Such rhetoric belongs to what I call climate change’s forensic imaginary: ways of sensing, interpreting, and representing climate change designed to furnish evidence in support of “climate justice,” defined broadly as an effort to assign responsibility and secure redress for harms caused by anthropogenic warming. In this talk, I consider an increasingly influential method for attributing harms to climate change called “extreme event attribution” (EEA). Treating this method as an aesthetic as well as scientific practice, I make a case for thinking about EEA as a kind of forensic aesthetics, which both detects and constructs evidence of climate change. The goal of EEA is to assign fractional culpability for climate change’s effects, supporting a vision of climate justice in which specific carbon emitters are held legally liable for specific consequences of their emissions. There are many ways to conceive climate justice, however, and I suggest that such efforts to furnish evidence of fractional culpability overlook more expansive understandings of climate change’s causes, consequences, and conditions of violence. The limitations of EEA clarify the enduring relevance of aesthetic questions posed by energy humanities scholars with respect to climate change and which remain crucial for anyone interested in climate justice: What does it mean to treat climate change as the consequence of “fossil capitalism” and the forms of life it sustains? Is it possible to represent the consequences of such fossil-fueled forms of life as a kind of “violence”? What would doing so entail? Posing these and related questions, I turn to the Marxian concepts of “totality” and “cognitive mapping” to consider possibilities for devising a forensic aesthetics adequate to the structural violence of fossil capitalism and its unevenly distributed effects.
Casey A. Williams is a Lecturer in the Center for Environmental Studies at Rice University, in Houston, Texas. He holds a PhD in Literature from Duke University with a specialization in cultural studies. He is currently writing a book about the aesthetics of climate crisis and the depoliticization of climate change in contemporary US culture. He is also working on projects related to renewable energy imaginaries, the political economy of “just energy transitions,” as well as the cultural impacts of renewable energy transitions across the globe. He has published work in Nature: Climate Change, Climate and Development, Radical Philosophy, Bare Life Review, and Polygraph, as well as in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Dissent, In These Times, and elsewhere.
Attacks on Knowledge, Then and Now
This paper will explore the history of the deliberate destruction of knowledge, focusing on libraries and archives over the past 3000 years, and contrasting them with the attacks on knowledge in the digital realm that are now happening around us. The paper will also explore the social importance of the preservation of knowledge and the 5 reasons why society needs libraries and archive to fulfil these functions’.
Richard Ovenden has been Bodley’s Librarian, University of Oxford, since 2014, and Head of Gardens, Libraries and Museums, since 2022. Prior to this he has held positions at Durham University Library, the House of Lords Library, the National Library of Scotland, and the University of Edinburgh. He was educated at the University of Durham and University College London, and holds a Professorial Fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford. He was awarded the OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2019. Richard serves as President of the Digital Preservation Coalition, and holds Fellowships of the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has been elected to both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was made an Honorary Doctor of Letters by Durham University in 2024.
He writes extensively on libraries, archives and information management, and has published a monograph on the 19th century Scottish photographer John Thomson, co-edited the massive 17th century library catalogue of Samuel Jeake, co-edited a volume of essays honouring the writer and editor Christopher Tolkien, and most recently is the author of Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge under Attack (2020) which was BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week, and was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize in 2021. He writes regularly for the Financial Times, The Atlantic, and Prospect.
