What happened in Dubai? Our fellow Adenike Oladosu was among the more than 85,000 participants at this year’s climate conference – a voice for climate justice within a vast flock of lobbyists – and was appalled by the huge numbers of fossil fuel representatives and the outsize presence of OPEC at the summit, which has made many lives in her homecountry Nigeria and other countries miserable. “If we do not phase out fossil fuel”, she says, “then every COP becomes a waste of time.”

What needs to happen now? For Adenike, the discussion about loss and damage is essential. “Africa feels the brunt of the climate crisis”, she says. “The loss of lives, of culture, history, natural sites, how do you pay for this?” One thing is clear to her: The world cannot wait for 2050 to achieve carbon neutrality. “We need tough sanctions to enforce climate action”, otherwise, she believes, it is going to be extremely difficult to hold nations and corporations accountable.

And where is the hope? Adenike and the UN Climate Change Conferences are almost exactly the same age. At 29-years old, she is optimistic about the power of young activists. “What we see at each climate conference is just politics”, she says. “The real hope is in young people like me who are demanding climate justice and accountability from world leaders.”

A different story of care: There is an intimate and urgent connection between the debates about climate and gender – and Ariel Hernandez, fellow in the program Conceptions of Human Flourishing, invited a group of leading academics in the field to discuss the violence in hierarchies of domination and possibilities for change.

How do we build a new community of care? Any meaningful discussion about the climate crisis needs to include voices that have been marginalized in the past, like First Nation and indigenous communities. Insights from psychoanalysis or post-colonial studies, all present at this workshop, add layers of history and open up spaces of shared pain and grief.  

One key insight: “Participation alone will not bring about the deep structural social institutional changes needed to address climate change, and the other cascading crises of our time, without a fundamental re-imagining of the concept of gender, gender ordering, identity politics, sexual violence and sites of contestation and struggle, including methodological and psycho-social advances.”

What is African time? Minna Salami, Program Chair of Black Feminism and the Polycrisis: Configuring a Novel Solution Space Through Intersectional Methodology,  plans to investigate this concept, among other things. In the words of Bayo Akomolafe, alumnus of THE NEW INSTITUTE: “The times are urgent, let us slow down”.

What is the program? Minna has invited an inspiring group of Black feminist thinkers and activists to Hamburg with the aim of examining how the processes of transformation „are intermittently sources of joy, transformation, and discovery of new communities, but also equally involve sorrow, risk, and the loss of communities once cherished.”

Resistance and community: For Minna, Black feminism contributes to a new sense of universality. "If you're a Western feminist and you're not thinking about imperialism and this kind of transnational movement, then what are you fighting against?", she said in a recent interview. One key message: This is about healing. 

The Winter Institute: Academic Director Markus Gabriel, along with alumnus Takahiro Nakajima, fellow Xudong Zhang, and intellectual Paul Pickering, hosted this year's Winter Institute at THE NEW INSTITUTE. In the context of the work towards a New Enlightenment, the theme was “The universal in crisis”, and the goal was to put the emerging concept of a future-oriented humanities to the test.

Ece Temelkuran’s swans: The writer, thinker and THE NEW INSTITUTE alumna saw her 2017 novel The Time of Mute Swans transferred to the stage. Hamburg’s Thalia Theater presented the story, set in Ece’s home country of Turkey in the 1970s and 1980s, an era of various coups d’état, viewed through the eyes of two children.

Max Krahé’s interventions: The political economist, THE NEW INSTITUTE alumnus, and co-founder of Dezernat Zukunft intervened prominently in Germany’s ongoing debate about the promise and peril of its very unique “debt brake”. For Spiegel magazine, Max outlined his response to the Federal Minister of Finance, Christian Lindner. His verdict: Spend more. 

Save the date: The Helmut-Schmidt-Zukuntfspreis 2024 will be awarded on May 15, 2024, at Thalia Theater in Hamburg. The international jury consists, among others, of Sanna Marin, former Prime Minister of Finland, Alexander Birken of Otto Group, Alaa Murabit of the Gates Foundation, and THE NEW INSTITUTE founder Erck Rickmers.