Mike Hulme, King’s College London
STEPS Public Lecture, followed by drinks reception – all welcome
Fulton A Lecture Theatre, University of Sussex

Download a poster (pdf)

Climate change is an environmental, cultural and political phenomenon which is reshaping the way people think about themselves, their societies and their Earthly futures. Climate change is therefore a major instance where scientific knowledge and symbolic imagination interact in multiple and complex ways.

In an earlier book, Why We Disagree about Climate Change, I considered the different ways people think about climate change in the contexts of science, economics, religion, psychology, risk communication, development sociology, and politics. In the six years since that book was published, new developments have occurred in nature, science, politics and culture, yet climate change continues to be an idea which both unites and divides us. In this talk I will consider why this is and what it tells us about the emerging narrative of the Anthropocene. My normative claim is that we need a variety of insights about climate and its cultural and political manifestations to offer a sufficient number of entry points for human actors to work creatively with the idea of climate change.

About Mike Hulme

Mike Hulme is professor of climate and culture in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. His work explores the idea of climate change using historical, cultural and scientific analyses, seeking to illuminate the numerous ways in which climate change is deployed in public and political discourse.

His latest book is Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case Against Climate Engineering (Polity) and is currently writing Cultured Weather: The Idea of Climate and What We Do With It (SAGE). He is also the author of Exploring Climate Change Through Science and In Society (Routledge) and Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Cambridge).

Drinks reception

This public lecture will be followed at about 7.30pm by a drinks reception in the same venue. All participants at the lecture are welcome to stay for drinks afterwards.

This event is part of the annual STEPS Centre Summer School. It is the only public event on this year’s programme.