Join us online for a talk and discussion event about human perception and the psychology of inaction in relation to climate crisis, as well as the relationship between extractive processes and corporate ir/responsibility.

We will hear from Kate Jeffery, Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience at UCL and Bobby Banerjee, Professor of Management and Associate Dean of Research and Enterprise at Cass Business School. The event will also include time for questions, group activity and collective discussion. Cognitive Dissonance forms the third in our series of online workshops led by The Alternative School of Economics as part of their residency The End of the Present.

The final event in the series, Cognitive Dissonance, follows on from two public mapping workshops which looked at the relationship between linear time and financial and environmental crises. Asking ‘where does a crisis begin and end’? the workshops used co-research processes to collectively re-map events, which have contributed to the ‘long crises’ of capitalism and its impact on the environment. Each workshop focused on different time periods - the first concentrating on the last 400 years of human activity, and the second reaching into deep time to try to understand both the physical preconditions and human perception of our environment, its resources and resulting crisis.

This event is free but booking is essential.

Kate Jeffery is Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience at University College London. Her scientific research explores how the brain makes an internal map of space for use in navigation and memory. She heads the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences at UCL, and is co-director of the electrophysiology company Axona Ltd. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, Fellow and Vice-President of the Royal Institute of Navigation, in which she also chairs the Cognition and Navigation special interest group. She is interested in making and communicating links between scientific research findings and real-world societal problems - notably urban design for navigation, and also the climate crisis.

Bobby Banerjee is Professor of management at the Cass Business School, City University of London. He researches and teaches on sustainability, climate change, corporate social irresponsibility and resistance movements. Prior to becoming an academic Bobby worked for US and European multinational corporations in the chemicals industry where as a sales manager he was responsible for overseeing the selling and import of chemicals that were banned in the US and Europe to developing countries. In the little spare time he has these days Bobby dreams of destroying global neoliberal capitalism.

Ruth Beale & Amy Feneck have been collaborating as The Alternative School of Economics since 2012. As an 'alternative school', they link artists' practice with self education as a way to study economics and economies. They are interested in reciprocal modes of learning and making, and their projects with communities create a framework for investigating political, social and cultural issues. They use diverse and creative methodologies, and collaborate with experts from a variety of disciplines, from sociologists to writers, to produce film, graphics, photography, texts and clothing, as forms of activation, dissemination and reflection.