COP 27 – Surviving the Apocalypse: From ‘me’ to ‘we’.

Ultimately, it comes down to political will, when confronting the climate crisis. Instead of indulging in Elon Musk’s fantasies about life on Mars, we need to focus on solutions in the here and now on earth, argued Alan Simpson in his final TED talk on how to confront the climate crisis. What is required is a visionary space for nature and the necessary political will to enact it. Money is not the issue.

 

COP 27 – Greening Everything: Putting back more than we take out.

If we want to confront the climate crisis successfully, greening everything and here especially our cities is key, argued Alan Simpson in the fifth talk of his COP 27 series. Rather than paving over everything in our cities, which is often the cause of flooding, we need to enlarge our green spaces. 

Watch out Benjamin Zephaniah! International Relations Theory poetry.

With a view to engaging students through different teaching methods, Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton launched a poetry competition in 2011 on their core MA module "Theories and Concepts in International Relations". After all, Roland Bleiker has himself emphasised the role of the poetic image in challenging dominant modes of thinking and practice within International Relations. With that aim in mind and the permission by the author, I am happy to publish this winning poem by Zubeda Mir that may surely rival the social criticism of Benjamin Zephaniah!

COP 27 – ‘The 15-minute city’: connectivity as driver of carbon reduction.

We do have the necessary alternatives. What is missing are politicians with the necessary radical vision to put these alternatives into practice, declared Alan Simpson at the opening of his fourth talk on how to confront the climate crisis. At the heart of this talk was the question of how can we rethink transport and mobility to overcome our addiction to cars? Ultimately, improved local transport combined in a joined-up system with local energy generation and food production is the way forward.

COP 27 – Energy: Back to the Future, local democracy, public ownership and social inclusion.

In his third talk on the Climate Crisis, Alan Simpson tackled the issue of energy production and distribution in a shift away from fossil fuel and towards green energy. Importantly, this is not simply a technological question of new inventions. This is about how to organize socially the production and distribution of energy differently, challenging directly the private ownership of the big energy companies.

 

COP 27 – Feeding the Future

In his second talk on the Climate Crisis, Alan Simpson focused on how to ensure sufficient, sustainable production of food for the future. The global food production system, based on ‘free’ trade and tightly controlled by a few large transnational corporations, results in one-third of what we produce being wasted. At the same time, offloading our surpluses in developing countries destroys the local food production there. In short, the problem is not growing enough food, the problem is how to ensure that food is produced sustainably and locally reaching everybody.

 

Neoliberal strikes for the neoliberal university!

UCU has yet again called for industrial action of academics and Administrative, Professional & Managerial (APM) staff over drastic – and unjustified – cuts to pensions, eroded pay and deteriorating working conditions. Indeed, considering the more general cost of living crisis across the UK at the moment, the situation for action has become even more pressing now than it was a year ago. On last year’s experience, however, it is also clear that striking in the traditional way of everyone out does no longer work. At Nottingham University, management sat out easily 18 days of strike. Considering that learning objectives had not been damaged and students could not, therefore, reclaim some of their tuition fees, management was very relaxed. Only the marking boycott in May 2021 brought them suddenly to the negotiating table resulting in a local agreement (see UCU Nottingham University 2022). In this guest post, Faiz Sheikh outlines what an alternative approach to industrial action in the neoliberal university could look like, potentially overcoming the shortcomings of the traditional approach.