Ecologies of Collapse

Ecologies of Collapse explores overlapping crises of the family, property, political imagination, and planetary futurity from a materialist perspective. Featuring lectures by Sarah Brouillette, Dominique Routhier, and Søren Mau, the seminar considers the new forms of thought and possibility that are disclosed by decline and catastrophe.

3:00 pm to 5:30 pm./ Jackman Humanities Building 100 / 170 St. George Street, University of Toronto

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Sarah Brouillette is a Marxist-feminist cultural materialist who studies publishing and social media. She is a Professor of English at Carleton University.

My paper explores how conservative thinkers have been pathologizing climate grief as a symptom of what they understand as a crisis of masculinity. I read their calls for the return of men to breadwinner positions within the context of the current climate crisis and the capitalist structures that undergird it. I challenge their assumption that this perceived crisis of masculinity can be solved simply via a (magical) revitalized labor force that is able to absorb workers and resources without limit. What, I ask, are the implications of the supposed crisis in masculinity for the climate crisis?

Dominique Routhier is an Assistant Professor at Roskilde University and a Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto. He is a co-founder of the Danish Society for Marxist Studies and the author of With and Against (Verso, 2023).

This paper analyses the recent wave of vandalism targeting Tesla cars and dealerships in relation to historically shifting repertoires of collective action—from strikes and riots to sabotage and other forms of property destruction. It asks why vandalism has moved to the fore within the contemporary climate movement, and what this shift reveals about the limits of environmentalism.

Søren Mau is a political philosopher and author of Mute Compulsion (Verso, 2023), whose work probes capitalism, power, ecology, and technology through the lens of freedom.

Marxist anti-utopianism has long been critical of efforts to envision post-capitalist futures. In this talk I will argue that this skepticism is not equally valid across historical periods. In our current moment – marked by the far right, fragmented struggles, economic stagnation and an escalating ecological crisis – we need to reconsider the role of utopian thinking. This talk aims to articulate a materialist defense of utopian imagination as a part of the struggle for freedom in the 21st century