Oral Presentation by Minh Thu Nguyen¹
¹ ISCTE-IUL, Portugal
TIME: Tuesday, 14 July, 10:30 – 12:00
Location: Room 2
Session: 2
Abstract
Climate crisis induced by extractive capitalism requires not only political actions in institutional stages such as COP30 but also changing citizen’s rights and responsibility around the world in everyday life to mitigate and adapt to it. While this phenomenon of climate citizenship is widely researched and practiced as individual ethical consumption of resources (as neoliberal) or human right advocacy for an inclusive society (as liberal), less is researched about alternative situated representation, especially in the Global South context. In the decolonial spirit of Spivak’s “Can the subaltern speak?”, this paper seeks to fill that gap by an ethnographical study in Belém, Brazil during and after the COP30 event. Through participatory observation and conversations with local citizens inside and outside of COP30 (N=5), the author tries to understand how they respond to the neoliberal climate citizenship that is mainly promoted in COP30 through “carbon trading” and “forest financing” schemes. The finding reveals citizens’ critical consciousness about the value of the Amazon forest beyond monetary and commodity that subjects to foreign trade and extraction to continue the destructive cycle of capitalism. This legitimates their feeling of identity lost when Amazone forest are sold to foreign corporate and individuals to offset their carbon footprint. Visit and observation of cultural spaces such as Bienal das Amazonias and historical site Murutucu also shed light on what alternative citizenship that indigenous knowledge could propose in place of neoliberal and liberal ones. One of these alternatives situated in the Amazone region is Florestania (a combination of Floresta – forest and Cidadania – citizenship), a form of citizenship grounded in an ethical and sensitive way of living with the forest that is coined by Amazonian Indigenous activist Ailton Krenak in Futuro ancestral book and articulated through the art works of Brazilian artist, poet and educator Roberto Evangelista. This paper will discuss how such “grounded citizenship” is important to defy the domination of neoliberal citizenship that alienates citizens from their environment and build a convivial relationship with nature. Thus, it theoretically contributes a radical humanistic ethics to social, political and environmental psychology of citizenship and practically contributes its prefiguration in art and social movements in the Global South.