– Carbon Hurt / Hacking the Imagination: Araceli Camargo

As part of the Open Curriculum, Humanities researcher Susannah Haslam speaks with Araceli Camargo. Camargo is a student of neuroscience, specialising in its relationship to health and place. Her ancestors are the first Peoples of Turtle Island, commonly known as colonised North America.

In this illuminating interview Camargo answers the question “what is carbon?” in relation to the linguistic roots of western knowledge. In unpacking the causal effects between the English language and its meaning in a larger social body, Camargo shows how ‘decarbonisation’ is strategised in the west suppresses the entire ‘beingness’ of carbon and limits imagination for a healthier world. In its place, Camargo argues the need for abolition, explaining how health and lived experiences are bound up with climate emergency in ways that are often little known or expressed.  

The Open Curriculum is an experimental alternative educational project. It puts love, dialogue, confidence, and coherence to work as observed and experienced qualities and capacities of art and education, toward critical reflection on what carbon literacy for arts workers means. The curriculum is composed of three subjects — carbon, solidarity, and work — offering a set of alternative routes to different forms of carbon literacy.