Kolloquium & Abendessen (Ro45)

Kolloquium by Prof. Dr. Frank Adloff

Professor for Sociology, esp. Dynamics and Regulation of Economy and Society at Universität Hamburg

Futures of Sustainability – The Case for Conviviality

The presentation will first introduce the work of the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies „Futures of Sustainability“ at the University of Hamburg. In the last decades, sustainability has become a guiding principle for states, companies, and social movements. While sustainability seems to be an inevitable trajectory, there is no consensus over the goals and visions of the future associated with this concept. The Centre distinguishes between three possible paths: modernization (green capitalism), transformation (degrowth, e.g.), and control (emergency state, e.g.). The talk will briefly look at the three paths and ask which path is how strong.

In the second part, I would like to go into some aspects of the transformation path that particularly interest me. This involves the question of how a fundamentally different – a convivial — relationship to nature could be established. To do this, I will draw firstly on the idea that there are gifts of nature to society, and secondly that the idea of nature’s own rights could initiate a major transformation.