2025 Humanities Symposium Keynote Lecture

"Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor"

The Great Uprooting: Migration and Movement in the Age of Climate Change

Acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh explores the climate crisis with reflections on how we are constrained by our current modes of thinking and how we might find a way forward.

"It has long been predicted that climate change will lead to large-scale displacements of population and mass migration. Is it possible to look at the European ‘migrant crisis’ of recent years through this prism? This, and many other related questions, prompted me to travel to migrant camps in Italy in 2017, to interview migrants whose languages I am familiar with: that is to say speakers of Bengali, Hindi, Urdu and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic. This talk is an attempt to identify some of the underlying patterns in the stories I was told by the migrants, in their own languages." - Amitav Ghosh

Center for the Humanities | Website | View More Events

Contact the organizers