Rory Varrato, PhD candidate in the Philosophy and Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University, was recently honored with two awards for his scholarly writing. First, Rory received the 2024 Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award from the Environmental Education Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. Second, Rory received the 2024 Matilda Levy Paper Award on Environmental Sustainability from the Center for Sustainable Futures at Teachers College, which is an affiliated unit of the Columbia Climate School. Both these awards were given in recognition of Rory’s paper titled “Extinction Rebellion: A Great Refusal for the Anthropocene.”

This paper is at the center of Rory’s dissertation research. In it, Rory chronicles his experience as a co-founder of the New York City chapter of Extinction Rebellion (XR), the global revolutionary movement for climate and ecological justice. Highlights of Rory’s activism with XR NYC include his many media appearances as the chapter’s spokesperson; his 2019 testimony before the New York City Council in support of a resolution declaring climate emergency, which passed; and his arrest during a nonviolent direct action at a News Corp distribution center in Queens on Earth Day 2022. Alongside this autoethnographic aspect of the paper, Rory also connects XR with a wide range of scholarship in the fields of environmental sociology, critical theory, environmental education, and the philosophy of education.

“Extinction Rebellion: A Great Refusal for the Anthropocene” has been presented at the 15 th International Critical Theory Conference of Rome and accepted for presentation at the 16 th Biennial Conference of the Radical Philosophy Association. The paper will be published later this year as a book chapter in The Marcusean Mind, a forthcoming volume in Routledge’s Philosophical Minds series.