Are We Living in a Global Hinge Moment? Thinking Critically About Very Bad Times, with Saptarishi Bandopadhyay

Many of us routinely overhear, encounter, and participate in conversations about the ‘end of the world,’ or ‘of life as we know it,’ or about ‘the new normal,’ and so on. Even as we may know that the state of affairs we are describing is, at least in part, the consequence of human actions and institutional choices over long periods of time, we speak about it with immediacy and in terms of massive and diffuse abstractions: climate change, the global economy, disasters, war, pandemics, refugee flows/displacement, and so on. And viewing these complex problems together creates a visceral sense that these crises are converging before our eyes. How can we study and hope to understand such phenomenon? 

Speaker Profile

Saptarishi Bandopadhyay is an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. He is a faculty affiliate of the Science, Technology & Society Program at Harvard University, a research Fellow at the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research at York University, and a Senior Fellow at Melbourne University Law School. Saptarishi holds a doctorate from Harvard University, LLMs from Harvard Law School and American University’s Washington College of Law, and a BALLB (Hons.) from the National University of Juridical Sciences, India. Saptarishi has received awards and fellowships from the Canadian Social Sciences and Research Council, the American Society for Legal History, the American Society for Environmental History, the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University, and Brown University. Saptarishi’s writing has appeared in encyclopedias, edited volumes, and in legal and interdisciplinary journals. His book, All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State was published by Oxford University Press in 2022.

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