LMN is delighted to announce our third Resisting Mining Book Club 2022 with guest speaker Damien Short, who will be speaking about his book Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide (Zed Books, 2016).
About the book:
In this controversial and original work, Damien Short systematically rethinks how genocide is and should be defined. Rather than focusing solely on a narrow conception of genocide as direct mass-killing, through close empirical analysis of a number of under-discussed case studies – including Palestine, Sri Lanka, Australia and Alberta, Canada – the book reveals the key role played by settler colonialism, capitalism, finite resources and the ecological crisis in driving genocidal social death on a global scale.
Damien Short will give an introductory lecture which will be followed by a Q&A. You do not need to have read the book to attend this meeting. However, if you want to read it, the book is available to buy in the UK, and all registered participants in the Book Club will be sent a PDF version via email.
About the author:
Professor Damien Short is Co-Director of the Human Rights Consortium (HRC) and a Professor of Human Rights and Environmental Justice at the School of Advanced Study. He has spent his entire professional career working in the field of human rights and environmental justice, both as a scholar and advocate. He has researched and published extensively in the areas of indigenous peoples’ rights, genocide studies, reconciliation projects and environmental human rights. He is currently researching the human rights impacts of extreme energy processes (e.g Tar Sands and Fracking – see our designated HRC website http://extremeenergy.org). He is also the Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Human Rights (Taylor and Francis) and Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Human Rights in the Commonwealth (University of London) and convenor of the British Sociological Association’s Sociology of Rights Study Group and an active member of the International Network of Genocide Scholars. Professor Short has also worked with a variety of NGOs including Amnesty International, War on Want, Survival International, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs; and with a range of campaign groups including Eradicating Ecocide, Biofuelwatch, Climate Justice Collective and the UK Tar Sands Network.