The Arendt on Earth Project: A panel discussion
Arendt on Earth takes the elusive concept of “earth” in the thought of Hannah Arendt as a frame, impetus and provocation to “think what we are doing” in the face of multiple, interconnected crises: rapid, unpredictable climate change; the boundlessness of modern production and consumption; the rule of instrumentality over science; fears of technology out of control; the “defactualization” of the world and the corruption of truth in politics; global catastrophes of poverty, displacement, statelessness and rightlessness; and the crises of legitimacy, power, and freedom that face democratic peoples and polities today. Our purpose is not only to foster scholarly engagement with Arendt’s writing, but to envision how the humanities can promote public comprehension of the burdens of our time.
- From the Arendt on Earth website
Meet the Speakers
Peg Birmingham is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and editor of Philosophy Today. She is the author of Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Indian UP, 2006), co-editor (with Philippe van Haute) of Dissensus Communis: Between Ethics and Politics (Koros, 1996) and co-editor (with Anna Yeatman) of Aporia of Rights: Citizenship in an Era of Human Rights (Bloomsbury, 2014).
PEG BIRMINGHAM
Lexi Neame served as the Project Director for Arendt on Earth. She is a political theorist with interests in the history of political thought, contemporary democratic theory, and the politics of science, technology and the environment (particularly climate science and contemporary data politics). Lexi has held fellowships at UCSB and Stanford and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Reed College, working on a book project entitled “Common Knowledge: Public Authority and Democratic Faith.”
LEXI NEAME
Linda Zerilli is the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. She has written extensively on Arendt, including in her most recent book, A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Chicago University Press, 2016), and in Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
LINDA ZERILLI
Benjamin Lazier is Professor of History and Humanities at Reed College. He teaches and writes about modern intellectual history, with interests in the history of technology, the environment, globalisms, psychoanalysis, interwar Europe, religious thought, political thought, political economy, animality, the emotions, and movements for social action. He is currently working on a history of the idea of the “whole Earth.” A sample of this project (Earthrise; or, the Globalization of the World Picture), a capsule history of philosophical reactions to the first images of the Earth from space, appeared in the American Historical Review.