2025 De Carle Distinguished Lecture series

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

Theodicy and secular narratives of progress help reconcile us to the injustices of the present by giving us a reason to believe things will work out in the long run. Climate change presents a serious challenge to these assumptions, which often implicitly structure our thinking about politics. There is now a clear mismatch between the temporality of the problem, which is an urgent crisis, and the temporality of politics, which requires slower relation-building. All of this generates considerable anxiety, which can be paralysing. I argue that we can address this anxiety and move beyond our implicit reliance on theodicy through a critique of the temporality of contemporary capitalism. I draw this account from an ecological reading of Guy Debord’s 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, which help us understand capitalism as a way of controlling our attention – that is, our experience of time. Fighting against climate change thus requires engaging in what Paul Apostolidis has called “the fight for time” – a fight to control our own time so that it is possible to build the social relations we need.

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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.