2025 De Carle Distinguished Lecture series

Presented by Associate Professor Benjamin McKean (PhD, MA Princeton, BA Harvard)

Popular sovereignty seems inescapable in contemporary politics; virtually all states claim to derive their authority from the people they purport to represent. Yet, as racist and anti-immigrant forms of reactionary populism have made vivid in recent years, appeals to “the people” can readily become exclusionary. What’s more, the pressing global challenge of a changing climate requires cooperation on an unprecedented scale; assertions of national sovereignty thus arguably present the most important practical obstacle to avoiding devastating environmental catastrophe. Nevertheless, popular sovereignty has been an indispensable tool for emancipation, employed as an ideal against imperialism and colonialism as well as a tool for democratizing authoritarian governments that refuse accountability to their citizens. We thus appear to be stuck in a paradoxical situation where popular sovereignty is both necessary and indefensible. Consequently, I argue that we need to reconceive both parts of popular sovereignty – both the representational logic that underwrites the claim to speak for “the people” and the nature of the sovereign power that they claim to wield. In the face of planet-altering climate change, the freedom that makes popular sovereignty normatively valuable now calls for a different institutional embodiment.

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About Associate Professor Benjamin McKean

Ben is a political theorist whose research concerns global justice, climate change, populism and the relationship between theory and practice.

Currently at The Ohio State University and formerly a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago, Ben is researching the inadequacy of existing political concepts for addressing climate change. His book, Disorienting Neoliberalism: Global Justice and the Outer Limit of Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2020) argues that people subject to unjust institutions and practices should be disposed to solidarity with others who are also subject to them – even when those relations cross state borders.

2025 series

Our lecture series starts on Tuesday 25 March, and concludes on Tuesday 6 May, as follows:

• Tuesday, 25 March: Is despair an obstacle to achieving climate justice?
• Wednesday, 2 April: Climate change as a challenge to theodicy and other narratives of progress*
• Tuesday, 8 April: Can popular sovereignty help us avoid climate catastrophe?
• Monday, 14 April: Does calling climate change a “global” problem erase indigenous politics?
• Tuesday, 29 April: Does addressing climate change require us to shift our understanding of “the market”?
• Tuesday, 6 May: Reorienting our way of seeing nature as a path to solidarity

Venue: Hutton Theatre, Tūhura Otago Museum, but *Wednesday, 2 April held in Burns 2
All lectures run 5:30–7pm. Staff, students, and members of the public are welcome to attend.