Mathieu Feagan

This talk focuses on transitioning toward equitable, sustainable futures through supporting and learning from the anticipatory capacities of marginalized knowledges. Long-term environmental sustainability requires a redistribution of power in society, challenging and iteratively transforming the dominant social order and power relations through which the evolving crisis of global climate change has developed. Transitioning toward sustainable futures demands naming and confronting long-standing patterns of inequity and injustice, and marginalized knowledges offer critical starting points and foresight capacities for fundamentally changing course, replacing the colonized futures handed down through dominant knowledge systems, with more just and sustainable alternatives. I provide an overview of how my work contributes to this end by studying how different ways of knowing hold anticipatory capacities that demand greater attention and support, confronting dominance through social struggle.

Mathieu Feagan is an interdisciplinary social scientist and postdoctoral research associate in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University, with the Urban Resilience to Extreme Events Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN). His work focuses on the production of alternative sustainable futures, using different ways of knowing — systems thinking, feminist perspectives, decolonial theory, and other critical standpoints — as key building blocks for making sense of, and intervening in, sustainability issues across local, regional, and global scales.

This is an Occasional Talk hosted by the School for the Innovation in Society.