Haste: The Slow Politics of Climate Urgency

by Eleanor Johnson (editor), Håvard Haarstad (Editor), Jakob Grandin (Editor)

A powerful argument for not approaching climate change in a hurry, but with a slow politics of urgency.
 
It’s understandable that we tend to present climate change as something urgently requiring action. Every day we fail to act, the potential for catastrophe grows. But is that framing itself a problem?  When we hurry, we make more mistakes. We overlook things. We get tunnel vision.
 
In Haste , a group of distinguished contributors makes the case for a slow politics of urgency. Rather than rushing and speeding up, he argues, the sustainable future is better served by our challenging of the dominant framings through which we understand time and change in society. While recognizing the need for certain types of urgency in climate politics, Haste directs attention to the different and alternative temporalities at play in climate and sustainability politics. Divided into short and accessible chapters, written by both established and emerging scholars from different disciplines, Haste tackles a major problem in contemporary climate change research and offers creative perspectives on pathways out of the climate emergency.

264 pages, Hardcover

Published April 24, 2023

About the author

Professor Johnson specializes in late medieval literature and culture. Her first book, Practicing Literary Theory in the Late Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve, was published in 2013 (Chicago). Her second book, Dramatizing Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama, was published in 2018 (Chicago). Her Third book, Waste and the Wasters, about ecosystemic thought in medieval England, came out in 2023 (Chicago). Her newest book, Scream with Me, on horror films in the 1970s, is forthcoming with Atria Books in 2025. She is also the Poetry Section editor at Public Books