The Department of Law, in partnership with Oxford University Press, welcomes you to the LSE for the 2019 London Review of International Law Annual Lecture, presented this year by Professor Danny Dorling.
'From Apology to Equality: making reparations for the harm done and the damage to come'
“What do we owe others in the face of mass extinction and biodiversity loss given our great responsibility? Professor Dorling examines the repercussions of making reparations for environmental harm.”
This lecture is about what we owe. It will begin with slavery before widening the discussion to the as yet unknown repercussion of entire species extinctions and biodiversity loss. Billions of peoples’ lives have and will be effected. Dorling will argue that the elites of the countries most responsible for the harm done in the past, which cause such damage today, almost always had no idea of the far wider damage they were causing. But being ignorant is not a valid excuse for not having to face up to the repercussions of your actions. This includes the damage now set in motion through causing climate change. Many ideas about how reparations can begin to be made are posited. But we may currently have a far too narrow a view of what harms have been caused and which people, and the ideas of others they came to believe in, were most responsible for the harm. There are very wide ranging implications, not least for universities, of accepting these arguments. One route forward to question the role that British universities currently play and could play in making reparations. Educational policy and fee-charging in Germany is compared to that of the UK, especially as regards non-national students. Reparations may have to be established that can be made in perpetuity, if there is to eventually be justice and peace.
About the speaker
Danny Dorling is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at Oxford and a Fellow of St Peters College, Oxford
Professor Dorling joined the School of Geography and the Environment in September 2013. He was previously a professor of Geography at the University of Sheffield. He has also worked in Newcastle, Bristol, Leeds and New Zealand, went to university in Newcastle upon Tyne, and to school in Oxford.
In 2006, Danny started working with a group of researchers on a project to remap the world. He has published with many colleagues more than a dozen books on issues related to social inequalities in Britain and several hundred journal papers. His work concerns issues of housing, health, employment, education and poverty. His recent books include, co-authored texts The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the way we live and Bankrupt Britain: An atlas of social change.
Before a career in academia Danny was employed as a play-worker in children's play-schemes and in pre-school education where the underlying rationale was that playing is learning for living. He tries not to forget this.