Climate Justice and the University: Shaping a hopeful future for all

Jennie C. Stephens, Professor of Climate Justice at Maynooth University, opens this provocative and immensely significant book by posing a simple but radical question: ‘Could universities become critical infrastructures for advancing transformative climate justice by imagining and creating better futures for all’ (p. 3). The very question is likely to raise unease among many academics who have been formed to imagine the university as a more neutral and disinterested space, generating and sharing knowledge for the overall good of society. But Stephens dares to ask how true this is, exposing the ‘capture of higher education by powerful elites and corporate interests’ and the ways in which universities ‘concentrate wealth and power by gatekeeping knowledge’ (p. 6). Already in the first few pages, the reader knows they are going to be taken on a rollercoaster ride through the realities of how universities really function as facilitators and drivers of much of the polycrisis that envelops our contemporary world, and how they could be transformed to foster the foundations of a better future for humankind.