Description:

Please join the Joint Comparative/International Relations Workshop as they host Lauren Baker and Ely Orrego-Torres.

Abstract: The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (COP) meetings have become mega events gathering not only decision makers, scientists, and civil society but also media, corporate sponsors, and industry lobbyists. This annual event rotates between different regions, and hosting is an opportunity for a state to advertise itself as an environmental leader to international and domestic audiences alike. What are the conditions of possibility that enable these massive events? I argue that we can study these sites of global environmental governance as spectacle. Performing the spectacle of global environmental governance requires constructing a site that enacts a dominant normative environmentalism that champions “sustainable development” and green consumption. Disruptive elements – including materials and people – that do not fit this narrative must be ordered, cleaned, transformed, or removed. Trash, poverty, and disorder cannot be on display. They must be sanitized. Based on participant observation at the two-week-long COP27 in Sharm el Sheikh as well as interviews and discourse analysis, I show how attending to the politics of waste in these spaces illuminates the construction of this spectacle. By examining the material practices of waste management and discourses about it, I argue that while spectacle involves violence of sanitization, it also creates new possibilities for environmental solidarity and mobilization.

Lauren M. Baker is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University. Her dissertation research examines the domestic impact for states that host large global environmental governance meetings like the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change annual Conference of Parties (UNFCCC COP) meetings. Her project focuses on waste management as to illustrate how diverse actors influence evolving environmental policies, practices, and norms. Prior to starting her doctoral studies, she served as project coordinator for the Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) based at George Washington University in Washington, DC as well as an associate editor with The Monkey Cage, a political science blog hosted on The Washington Post. Lauren has lived and studied in Morocco, the UAE, Israel, and the West Bank, and has traveled widely in the broader Middle East and North Africa. She earned her master's degree in Middle Eastern Studies from The University of Texas at Austin and her bachelor's degree in International Studies from Allegheny College. She speaks Arabic, French, and Spanish.

Ely Orrego-Torres is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University and Visiting PhD student at Sciences Po, affiliated with the Centre de Recherches Internationales (CERI) (2023-2024). Her research agenda intertwines political theory and international relations to address questions on religion and politics in the global context. Her interdisciplinary approach relies on critical theories and liberation theologies to account for narratives of religious freedom, political theologies, and secularisms in the history of the present. Her dissertation studies the discourses and practices of religious freedom and secularism in the Americas over the last years (2017–2023) by devoting attention to transnational and regional networks, particularly, the civil society actors participating in the Organization of American States (OAS).