Climate Dialogues 2026: Ecological Solidarities

As the climate crisis intensifies already existing inequalities while binding human and more-than-human lives ever more tightly together, the question of solidarity invites renewed philosophical and political attention. “Being in solidarity” can mean that we share an experience of oppression, a workplace, or a political position. But solidarities multiply, especially when we ask what it might mean to be on the side of living ecologies, our damaged but ongoing world, or living beings across the globe from us. Can we pick a side even when the collectivity we mean to act alongside doesn’t yet fully exist? What might solidarities among the discarded, metabolically complex, and unfinished become?

Climate Dialogues, a flagship event of CETE-P, edition 2026, will bring together Michael Marder and Alexis Shotwell to probe the concept of ecological solidarities beyond moral exhortation and individual responsibility. The main question of this public talk will be what it means to think and act in solidarity with beings that, when approached from the anthropocentric perspective, seem neither to speak nor to reciprocate, and how attention to unevenly distributed vulnerability reshapes ethical and political responsibility.

Shotwell and Marder will examine how the emergent and plural ecological solidarities challenge dominant political imaginaries grounded in autonomy, mastery, and human exceptionalism. They will ask what it means to think and act in solidarity with beings that, when approached from the anthropocentric perspective, seem neither to speak nor to reciprocate, and how attention to unevenly distributed vulnerability reshapes ethical and political responsibility. Rather than offering solutions or prescriptions, the encounter invites participants to dwell with the tensions of interdependence, care, and damage that redefine life today.

Alexis Shotwell is a Professor at Carleton University, on unceded Algonquin land. Her academic work addresses impurity, environmental justice, racial formation, disability, unspeakable and unspoken knowledge, sexuality, gender, and political transformation. She also gives workshops on reducing suffering in our writing and teaching practices and is the co-investigator for the project "Writing as Thinking in the Canadian context" as well as the AIDS Activist History Project (aidsactivisthistory.ca). She is the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, and Liberation is Other People (forthcoming, 2026). Website: alexisshotwell.com

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz. His most recent books include The Phoenix Complex (2023), Time Is a Plant (2023), with Edward S. Casey, Plants in Place (2024), Eco-Freud (2025), Metamorphoses Reimagined (2025), with Anais Tondeur, Fiori di fuoco (2025), and Of Joints and Other Articulations (2026). More information at michaelmarder.org.

More information on Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics - Prague | Centrum pro environmentální a technologickou etiku - Praha