Energy

This Is An Actual Lecture At MIT: ‘Is Islamophobia Accelerating Global Warming?’

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Andrew Follett Energy and Science Reporter
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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hosted a lecture Monday that went where only few lectures have gone before: the intersection of Islamophobia and global warming.

The MIT lecture — titled “Is Islamophobia Accelerating Global Warming?” — features a talk from professor Ghassan Hage of the University of Melbourne, on the “relation between Islamophobia as the dominant form of racism today and the ecological crisis,” according to a MIT webpage advertising the lecture.

“It looks at the three common ways in which the two phenomena are seen to be linked: as an entanglement of two crises, metaphorically related with one being a source of imagery for the other and both originating in colonial forms of capitalist accumulation,” according to the lecture’s webpage. “The talk proposes a fourth way of linking the two: an argument that they are both emanating from a similar mode of being, or enmeshment, in the world, what is referred to as ‘generalised domestication.’”

Hage’s lecture is not the first attempt to tie global warming to colonialism or social justice theories. For years, activists have seen global warming as an opportunity to promote their own social theories.

MIT is hardly the only top-tier college to promote global warming in an odd way. The University of Virginia hosted a ballet to raise awareness about global warming last Wednesday and there’s a powerful movement among activists to divest college endowments from conventional energy sources.

According to MIT’s webpage, Hage studies “the comparative anthropology of nationalism, multiculturalism, diaspora and racism and on the relation between anthropology, philosophy and social and political theory.”

The average MIT student in the 2014-2015 academic year spent $58,240 for tuition and other expenses to attend the school. MIT is a private institution and is ranked as the 7th best university in America, according to U.S. News & World Report.

The talk was sponsored by MIT’s Ecology and Justice Forum In Global Studies and Languages. It was free and open to the public.

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