Environmental Citizenship: Identity Formation in the Face of Climate Change
Climate change is a global issue that does not stop at national borders. What can arts and culture do to foster a greater sense of planetary belonging that helps foster global action?
Through this project, we hope to advance our thinking on how to connect cosmopolitanism and environmental citizenship in relation to cultural policy. In doing so, we will indirectly build on Ulrich Beck’s unfinished project ‘Methodological Cosmopolitanism – In the Laboratory of Climate Change’, which he was working on when he passed away in 2015. His posthumously published book, The Metamorphosis of the World (Beck 2016) analyses how the cosmopolitanised world can react to climate change as it unfolds. This book raises questions and proposes approaches, but does so through sociological analysis, leaving many questions for cultural policy responses unaddressed. Our project asks how cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitanisation can help inform a new kind of ‘cosmopolitan environmental citizenship’, beyond mere national citizenship. In doing so, we will explore the future of cultural policy in the ‘Anthropocene’.
Outcomes / activities
Our project aims to combine our interest and experience in cultural policy, sustainability, and identity in order to develop a theoretical articulation of what cosmopolitan environmental citizenship might look like.
More information
- What can the arts do in the face of climate change?
Dr Christiaan De Beukelaer, Senior Lecturer in Arts and Cultural Management, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne