(Submit proposals -up to 200-word abstracts- before 27 January 2023)
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According to Bruno Latour, the late French anthropologist and philosopher, it was commonplace during modernity to think that nature had nothing to do with politics: Nature was perceived as the chessboard on top of which human affairs took place.
The ecological and social crises we have been facing during the last decades demonstrate that this was not the case. Nature, far from having a passive role, is a plurality of active agents that are strongly related to human activities.
The relationship between nature and society raises a variety of justice questions: How can we halt injustices between the Global North and the Global South, between different societal groups and generations? How can we achieve justice between humans, animals and other components of the natural world? No single academic discipline has provided sufficient answers to these questions; environmental justice rather needs to be addressed in a multi-disciplinary effort.
One aspect that has received relatively little attention is how natural agents have imposed certain scales and paces of time on political and judicial processes. While we are familiar with talk about ‘crisis’ and scenarios of the end time, the more specific relationship between environmental justice and time has not yet been systematically explored. Recent court cases have highlighted the question of time for achieving environmental justice: as natural and ecological processes develop according to their own time, this has implications for what can be deemed just and fair in politics, the economy and society.
Time is also relevant for intergenerational justice concerns; these include debates that are not only relevant in moral philosophy, but also in other arts and humanities disciplines and the social sciences. Not least, the natural sciences also relate to intergenerational perspectives, due to their central contribution to thinking temporality beyond a human scale.
Our workshop seeks to bring together scholars working on issues related to environmental justice and time from different disciplinary perspectives. We welcome submissions from the fields of ecology, biology, engineering, environmental history, sociology, philosophy, law, international relations, environmental economics, and related disciplines.
Topics might include (but are not limited to) new ideas and perspectives in relation to energy justice over time, social mobilization for justice of future generations, justice considerations of the past, the time dimension in interspecies and multispecies justice, the relationship between ecological/biological processes, justice and time, intergenerational justice, new philosophical approaches to the concept of nature, nature and politics, agency in nature and time.
The workshop
The workshop will take place in a hybrid format on 2 and 3 May 2023. Presenters and interested guests are welcome to join the workshop in person at Stirling University but please note that we cannot take over any travel or accommodation costs. Virtual presentations (and participation) are also possible.
We are currently exploring opportunities to publish selected papers in a special journal issue on ‘environmental justice and time’. More information will be provided/discussed with all contributors at the workshop.
Please submit proposals (up to 200-word abstracts) before 27 January 2023 to Professor Andrea Schapper (andrea.schapper@stir.ac.uk), Jesús Pinto (jesus.pinto@uam.es) and Adrián Santamaría (adrian.santamaria@uam.es).
Participants will be notified of acceptance in the second week of February 2023.
Upon acceptance, we will ask you to prepare a written think piece of about 2500 words, which should be submitted to the organizing team by 14 April 2023.
Organisers
Human Security, Conflict and Co-operation Research Group and Centre for Policy, Conflict and Co-Operation Research (University of Stirling) and Grupo de investigación en Humanidades Ecológicas – Ecological Humanities Research Group (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid). Collaboration thanks to the YERUN Research Mobility Awards.
Convenors
Professor Andrea Schapper (University of Stirling), Professor Holger Nehring (University of Stirling), Jesús Pinto (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Adrián Santamaría (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid).