Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Our beliefs, the stories we tell ourselves, the decisions, and actions we take every day, define possible futures going forward. Greta Thunberg started Fridays for Future, based on her frustration and despair that her future, and the future of generations to come, is being made impossible by the “hopeful” empty promises of hypothetical distant climate targets full of loopholes and contradictions, “so we can continue to ignore the consequences of our actions, pretend everything is alright, and go back to sleep!” Human planetary dominance makes the life of millions of species impossible. Inequitable societies make peaceful futures impossible. A global political economy based on extraction, growth, and wealth, makes environmental justice impossible. In this lecture, Esther Figueroa will talk about environmental injustice not only from the perspective of humans, but non-human and planetary justice. She will challenge us to go beyond the impossible futures we are creating and instead change our narratives, change our imaginations, and change our actions to create credible futures for Planet Earth.

More information here. Register here.

Esther Figueroa, PhD, is a Jamaican independent film maker, writer, educator and linguist with over thirty five years of media productions including television programming, documentaries, educational videos, multimedia and feature film. Her activist film making gives voice to those outside of mainstream media and focuses on the perpetuation of local and indigenous knowledge and cultures, the environment, social injustice, and community empowerment. Figueroa’s films are screened and televised all over the world and taught at numerous universities. They include Jamaica for Sale (2009), the award-winning feature documentary about tourism and unsustainable development. Her latest feature documentary Fly Me To The Moon (2019) is about modernity and the global aluminum industry. She recently created and co-hosted GEFF 2020, the first online film festival focused on global extraction. In 2013, Figueroa was Distinguished Writer in Residence at University of Hawai’i English Department. Her environmental novel Limbo (2013), was a finalist in the 2014 National Indie Excellence Awards for Multi-cultural Fiction.

This event series is sponsored by the Department of English, the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, the Center for Latin American Studies, Jack E. Davis, Rothman Family Chair in the Humanities, Imagining Climate Change and the Graduate Film Studies Group