Just Futures: A Panel on Climate Adaptation, Infrastructure, and Resource Stewardship in the Caribbean

This panel aims to unravel the Caribbean region’s current climate challenges, firmly rooted in its historical legacies. Equipped with the knowledge of long-durée histories and historical contingencies, our discussion aims to illuminate how these factors have shaped the present moment of climate change impacts. From this vantage point, we explore a spectrum of infrastructural, policy, and social pathways toward sustainable, liveable Caribbean futures. Central to our inquiry are questions that bridge past and present, theory, and practice. We explore how the intricate tapestry of colonial and postcolonial development histories has shaped the Caribbean’s current environmental and resource dilemmas. This dialogue further examines how post-colonial nations navigate the delicate balance between development goals, resource extraction, and global climate imperatives. A focused examination is directed towards the roles of engineering, natural, and social infrastructures in strengthening coastal Caribbean communities and in their potential for reparative worldbuilding.

Given the complexity and scale of these questions, our panel employs an interdisciplinary approach, leveraging a variety of methods to address the intricate interplay of ideological and material challenges emerging from colonial and climate crises. We bring together perspectives from the Hispanophone, Francophone, Anglophone, and Creolophone Caribbean. In this way, we are crucially thinking beyond the political and linguistic boundaries that have heretofore plagued and hindered climate adaptation efforts. This panel aims to spark conversations beyond the nation-state to combat the physically and philosophically existential challenges currently faced by Caribbean peoples.

While the co-founders of the Caribbean Coalition at Berkeley will be presenting our work as an introduction to this new RSO/working group and our Caribbean Futures event series, we invite any and all people of Caribbean descent, Caribbeanists, and those in solidarity with Caribbean peoples to come open and willing to engage and share their own work and perspectives. We also invite you to stay for the reception and get to know other people in the Berkeley community committed to the Caribbean.

• Speaker:Adriana Gonzales, Ph.D. Student, Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley
• Speaker: Anna Palmer, Ph.D. Student, Sociology, UC Berkeley
• Speaker:J’Anna Lue, Ph.D. Student, Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley
• Speaker: Alexandre Georges, Ph.D. Candidate, Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley
• Speaker: Jimena Perez, Ph.D. Student, Geography, UC Berkeley