OLIVIA C. HARRISON

OLIVIA C. HARRISON

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Author of Natives against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France
Associate Professor of French & Comparative Literature at University of Southern California

We know, of course, how colonized territories were settled. They were settled by the poorest, most marginal sometimes, criminal, surplus populations. There is that inbuilt fear, right? I don't want to narrate this in psychological terms, but I do think that there's a way we can understand how these discourses have worked. How is it that these discourses that don't actually make sense when you read them work? It's because they offer a solution. So it's not the fault of globalization in neoliberalism that you don't have a job. It's because of these people at the gates, right? So it just taps into these very primal kind of ways of thinking about threats to one's own well-being. 

DR. JENNIFER M. GÓMEZ

DR. JENNIFER M. GÓMEZ

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Author of The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women and Girls: A Black Feminist Approach to Healing from Sexual Abuse
Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work · Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Innovation in Social Work & Health at Boston University,

So many of us have experienced things along this vein, and when we know that, then the feelings of isolation can be interrupted with this understanding that many of us have been through these things. And if that person over there can experience joy, well maybe I can experience joy too, and maybe this is a different kind of harm and cultural betrayal. Sexual trauma and abuse as a collective community-level harm, that means community-level healing and personal healing.

ADAM ARON

ADAM ARON

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Author of The Climate Crisis: Science, Impacts, Policy, Psychology, Justice, Social Movements
Professor of Psychology at UC San Diego · Climate Activist

Psychology has something to tell us about why so few people are really engaged in the climate struggle. There are different components to this. First of all, there is what I call epistemic skepticism in the book, which is to say, skepticism about the facts of climate change. The second thing is threat perception, that threat levels are not as high as they should be. And the third is that people are skeptical about the response. They don't think that they can do anything, or they don't believe that groups or even countries can make a difference. Epistemic skepticism: psychologically this means that quite a lot of people, for example, the United States, don't believe in the human cause of heating. And the reason for that is very much to do in fact, with the systematic campaign of misinformation that's been fostered by the fossils industry, systematically set out to confuse people about the scientific consensus. We should be very threatened by this. In fact, the youth, generally speaking, are anxious to some extent about it. In effect, Mother Earth is saying, "I can't deal with what you're doing to me, people. I'm putting up my temperature." And if you're not feeling anxious, then you're not paying attention. That's the right way to feel on Planet Earth.

CYNTHIA G. FRANKLIN

CYNTHIA G. FRANKLIN

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Author of Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea
Professor of English at University of Hawai'i · Coeditor of the journal Biography

I posit narrated humanity as a lens through which to study how narratives participate in struggles to conceive human being beyond juridical and narrative humanity. What I was thinking about was just the kind of narrative codes and conventions and genres that help us to understand who counts as human in ways that people who are fighting for human rights as a thing that you have to do, even as there are all kinds of critiques that can and have been made rightly so of human rights, but that you have to do it.