Worlds in Transformation: A new critical Orthodoxy?
With political scientist and researcher Ulrich Brand
Angewandte
Interdisciplinary Lab
Presented by Art x Science School for Transformation
In the face of escalating
global crises, transformation has gained increasing political and academic traction, as a critical diagnostic and pedagogy
of our times. While initially signaling the need for a radical shift away from energy-intensive, wasteful modes of production
and lifestyles, it has since been co-opted by a variety of political and techno-scientific projects that do little to challenge
the status quo. How can we understand the diverse range of interests subsumed under the rubric of transformation? And how
do they affect the public acceptance of the radical steps needed to replace unsustainable patterns with viable alternatives?
Guest of this event is political scientist and researcher Ulrich Brand, whose
work on ‘The Imperial Mode of Living’ and ‘Kapitalismus am Limit ’ [Capitalism at its Limit] has been instructive for the
critique of systemic obstacles to change.
Brand contends that without a radical problem diagnosis, the strategic use
of transformation runs the risk of becoming a new critical orthodoxy; a belief system that is difficult to question and that
merely prepares the epistemic-political terrain for a greening of capitalism, while entrenching harmful, destructive patterns
and inequalities.
https://ail.angewandte.at/program/talk-school-of-transformation 
