Join Lior Hamovitz, PhD candidate in Political Science at Boston University, and Dr. Michaila Peters, Civil Discourse Fellow at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, for a discussion of environmental grief and climate change.
Hamovitz and Peters are eco-feminist political philosophers who adopt a localized lens to find pathways to building solidarity towards environmental justice. Their work focuses on rural and indigenous communities that are often divided along racial, gendered, and colonial lines. Peters' work on Appalachia and Hamovitz's work in Ecuador, Peru and Colombia, converge on the value of grief and mourning as a way to facilitate discourse around climate change. Their research in regions that have been vulnerable to manipulative extractivist ideologies or extremist political movements yields divergent but complementing approaches to the ethical demands of a warming world.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Lunch will be provided.
About the speakers
Lior Hamovitz is an environmental justice scholar pursuing a PhD in political theory at Boston University. Her research examines the relationship between kinship, loss, and climate change. Her doctoral dissertation bridges the insights of critical feminist and decolonial scholarship, ecological jurisprudence, and Indigenous epistemologies with a focus on Andean philosophy.
Michaila Peters is an Appalachian eco-feminist philosopher interested in healing rural-urban political polarization. She received her PhD in Philosophy from Boston College. For the past year, Peters has been a research fellow at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. Previously, she graduated from the American University School of Public Affairs, where she actively worked with de-polarization non-profits, and studied philosophy as a Fulbright Killam Fellow at the University of Toronto. Peters is currently working on a book that investigates how rural climate injustice led to the rise of fascism in the United States. Thinking with bell hooks, she proposes that subaltern rural grief can interrupt rural-urban political polarization and imagine pathways towards climate justice.
About Ethics Exchange
Ideas take on a different shape when they’re shared around a table. The Ethics Exchange gathers our community over lunch in the Dennis F. Thompson Seminar Room to think aloud about questions that matter. Building on the traditions of Ethics in Your World and Ethics Mondays, the series alternates between two formats: some sessions are open conversations, guided by a short reading or prompt; others feature invited speakers who share their work before opening the floor for dialogue. The aim is not to deliver neat answers but to create a space for genuine exchange—of ideas, perspectives, and disagreements—in an informal and engaging setting. Come with curiosity, and leave with sharper questions, new connections, and of course, full bellies.
All attendees must agree to the Chatham House Rule: participants are free to use information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speakers may be revealed.