Climate Samvada: Conversations on Well-being and Hope
What does climate collapse and chaos mean for all of us? How do we move from climate doom to climate hope? What does that hope constitute? How can we think about adaptation and resilience from a perspective of mental health and wellbeing? What are some of the ways in which we can act to find hope and solidarity in the face of environmental and social collapse. Participants joined Benson Issac to explore these questions in a day-long, immersive, theatre-based workshop to talk about personal and collective feelings around climate change. This was a bilingual workshop in Kannada and English.
About the Sociologist
Benson Issac spent 10 years as Faculty in the School of Development at the Azim Premji University where he taught courses on Social Interventions, Critical Perspectives on Mental health and Illness, Contemporary Social Movements and has always worked using the classroom itself as the first entry point into understanding sociology, anthropology and politics.
His association with Greenpeace, CIVIDEP, Samvada, Narmada Bachao Andolan, Mel Jol have shaped his understanding of the world and the complexity and challenges of engaging in processes of social change. He has been working on Climate Change and in the time at Greenpeace as the Programme Director, he focussed on integrating behaviour and mindset shift based campaigning strategies into Greenpeace Programmes. Working with young people in Agriculture, Handicrafts, Mental Health and exploring socially just and sustainable livelihoods through the platform that Samvada creates has been at the core of his practice. After being reluctantly coaxed into exploring Theatre of the Oppressed, its been an exciting journey and he has been working to integrate TO into the curriculum and classroom settings in the Higher Education space and work with TO and Theatre for Living in many other spaces including Organisation building, sensitisation around issues of sexual harassment, climate change, anti-communal efforts and mental health initiatives.