Monday 5th August - 06:00 PM BST
The Headline Debate: The Age of Emergency
Challenging the Polycrisis
Join IAI Live August for an online programme of debate, discussion, and discovery with the world's leading thinkers on the critical issues of our time taking place in our online festival venue. IAI Live August, featuring world-renowned speakers Anne Applebaum, Genevieve Gunther, Penny Mordaunt, Steve Koonin and Daron Acemoglu, tackles the notion and language of risk and catastrophe.
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'From the cost of living crisis to the climate crisis, the crisis in healthcare to the crisis of migration, we live in a world of seemingly relentless crisis. Politicians, commenators and social media typically demand urgent government responses. But there are dangers to the vocabulary of catastrophe. If everything is a crisis there is a risk we take none seriously, or take the wrong threats seriously. 38% of Americans avoid the news because of 'crisis fatigue'. In addition continuous crisis risks paralysing decision making with demands for instant and immediate action. Moreover critics argue a focus on crisis obscures aspects of culture that are performing well which require focus and attention to deliver their potential.
Should we be sceptical of the language of crisis, and see it as a means to generate attention and a form of self-promotion and media hype? Or is it more fundamentally a product of a culture that is in relative decline and dissatisfied with itself? Or should we see the focus on threats and crisis necessary to generate the action required to overcome the deep challenges we face?
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Daron Acemoglu
Daron Acemoglu is a Professor of Economics at MIT, and co-author of best-selling book ‘Why Nations Fail’, a seminal work in the field of developmental economics.
Genevieve Guenther
Political Language Expert
Genevieve Gunther is a climate activist and author of the book The Language of Climate Politics. Her work seeks to uncover the ways seemingly well-meaning commentators get taken in by fossil fuel talking points. She is a founding director of the organisation End Climate Silence.
Her work has been widely featured in outlets such as the New York Times, CNN, and The New Yorker. She was also an expert-reviewer on the sixth IPCC Assessment Report.
Steve Koonin
Obama's Science Expert
Steve Koonin is a theoretical physicist and the former director of the Centr for Urban Science and Progress at NYU. He served as President Obama's Undersecretary of Science in the Department of Energy and has since researched the science behind political claims about climate change.
He has also advised the National Sciences Foundation, Department of Defense, and the Institute of Defense Analysis. His 2021 book Unsettled was met with fierce debate.