RLEC published on “Climate Change: Social and Cultural Challenges”

The new Lusophone Journal of Cultural Studies (RLEC) on “Climate Change: Social and Cultural Challenges”, edited by Alice Balbé, Edson Capoano and Alejandro Barranquero, has just been published.

According to the editors, “Climate change is one of the foremost global challenges. It is global because shifts in climate patterns impact people differently, but ultimately, everyone will be affected. Recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), including the sixth assessment (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2023), underscore the interplay between geographical location and economic, political, and socio-cultural factors. That means that factors such as social class, race, ethnicity, gender and age, which are associated with different levels of social vulnerability, influence the likelihood of suffering from the impacts of the phenomenon and complicate the ability to cope with them, highlighting the social challenges related to climate action and climate justice”. They also mention that “this intersection between the climate emergency and other contemporary social issues makes it ever more important to bring social and cultural challenges into public debate. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, a leading figure in post-colonial studies, has highlighted the distinctions and dichotomies between ‘natural’, ‘human’, planetary, and global history. He argues that for many years, the environmental issue has been largely absent from historical discourse, particularly regarding human impact on Earth’s history. In Chakrabarty’s (2021) view, these concepts are interconnected; the human condition has evolved to become increasingly planetary. According to the author, ‘planetary’ refers to the connection between the Earth’s system, species, and human society on the planet, while ‘global’ pertains to interactions, consumption, capitalism, and extractivism”.