Karen Vallgårda. Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission: Education and Emotions in South India and Denmark

Review: Karen Vallgårda. Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission: Education and Emotions in South India and Denmark. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2015, 279 pp.</p

On the Difference Between Anthropocene and Climate Change Temporalities

This article compares two dominating conceptual frameworks of the current global environmental crisis, the Anthropocene and climate change, with respect to how they can be deployed to think about the dynamics of political action. Whereas the Anthropocene has attracted the attention of audiences beyond specialists and has radically expanded the temporal horizon for politics, its temporal characteristics risk rendering it unhelpful for thinking critically about how the current environmental crisis can be addressed. Most importantly, by establishing a reference point in a distant future from which the present is evaluated, the Anthropocene framework gives the impression that the future is already determined and that the course of future environmental degradation is set. The Anthropocene thus fails to specify what is at stake for politics in the current crisis. As a contrast, the climate-change framework is structured as a range of scenarios. It establishes a temporal structure that opens the present to different potential futures and manifests the fact that the level of emissions in the coming decades is decisive for future climate change but not yet determined. Further, the presence of tipping points in the climate system can be understood in temporal terms as a risk in some scenarios of falling into a temporality of unfolding, a mode in which game-changing events that lead to even more emissions proceed beyond human influence. The risk of entering such a temporality that closes down the possibility to meaningfully deliberate on fundamental aspects of the future increases with the rate of emissions. The climate-change framework in this way helps us understand the environmental crisis in a new way, namely by conceptualizing the open future as a finite resource that has to be distributed globally and across generations. In sum, as a framework for engaging with environmental derangement, the climate-change framework offers a more specific and politically useful temporality than the Anthropocene

Historicising the Question of Democracy's Presentism : The Concept of Interest and Political Languages of the Future in France, 1830–1850

A long-standing allegation holds that democracy is inherently biased in favour of the present to the detriment of the future. In this article, I question this premise by looking at temporality as a contested aspect of democratic practices of legitimisation. I approach democracy as a fundamentally historical phenomenon with language-based practices at its core. This is done through an examination of parliamentary debates on long-term policies on forests in the 1830s and 40s in France. In this context, there was a struggle over temporality that was played out as a conflict over the concept of interest. This article suggests an examination of the concept of interest as a locus for contestation between competing political languages implying different temporalities as a way of understanding democracy historically. The development of a concept of interest with the long term at its core in the late 1840s can be seen as a redescription of key concepts established as part of the radical Enlightenment political program of presentism. Following this analysis, I argue that democracy is not inherently presentist, but is shaped by a history in which both languages of radical presentism and elaborate long-term perspectives are constitutive parts. As such, these languages make up resources for developing legitimacy for long-term policies in contemporary democracies

The Future of the Noosphere

In this article, a Koselleckian approach to the issue of time will be employed. In Koselleck's view, modernity has been characterized by a multiplicity of synchronous times, or as Helge Jordheim puts it, by "multiple temporalities". By temporality, Koselleck means something different than epochs or periodizations. More precisely, Jordheim asserts, Koselleck uses this term to reach for experiences of time, such as "progress, decadence, acceleration, or delay, the 'not yet' and the 'no longer', the 'earlier' or 'later than', the 'too early' and the 'too late', situation and the duration". Especially pertinent for this article is Koselleck's category of a horizon of expectations (Erwartungshorizont), understood as perceived prospects for the future. In both the noosphere and the Anthropocene discussion, the notion of an Age of Man seems to merge different timescales into one another, or, as stated by one of the most prominent scientists in the early debate, "The division of historical and geological time is levelled out for us". This article examines the temporality implied in the noosphere concept in order to formulate a specific question regarding the Anthropocene. The article is thus intended to contribute to the on-going examination of the Anthropocene concept by way of historicising its temporality

Time for politics : How a conceptual history of forests can help us politicize the long term

In a recent scholarly debate, the Anthropocene concept has been criticized for diverting attention from the political aspects of contemporary environmental crises, not least by way of the long timescales it implies. This article therefore takes on the matter of long-termism as an historical and political phenomenon, by applying a conceptual historical perspective. Examples are drawn from historical studies of forest politics. It is argued that conceptions of the long term, as in all concepts in political language, are historical and therefore problematic to legitimately define conclusively. However, many of the environmental crises looming in our time do indeed call for long-term perspectives. As a solution in accordance with its historical and democratic conceptual character, it is suggested that political long-termism paradoxically can and should be constantly deliberated upon and renewed in the short term. Its conceptual history can then serve two purposes: First, history can offer exempla of how long-termism can be conceptualized and institutionalized in ways that encourage continuous deliberation and reconceptualization. Second, historical conceptualizations of the long term can be drawn upon, both negatively and positively, in this continuous deliberation.Political Representation of Future Generations: Sustainability in Political Language, France 1780–185

Lyft klimatet - starta ett medborgarråd

Debattörerna: Vanliga svenskar måste få bli mer delaktigaDEBATT. Den gångna sommaren har präglats av torka, rekordtemperaturer och översvämningar på många håll i världen.Att bromsa klimatförändringarna blir en alltmer akut politisk uppgift, men de beslut som krävs för att minska utsläppen fattas inte. Förra året ökade till och med de svenska utsläppen av växthusgaser med fyra procent