CFP Pollen 2020: Utopian ecologies of urburnable fuels

[lorenzopelle]

CFP Pollen 2020: Utopian ecologies of urburnable fuels

In order to limit the probable increase in global mean temperature to 2°C, about 80%, 50% and 30% of existing coal, gas and oil reserves, respectively, would need to remain under the soil and more ambitious targets would be necessary to comply with the commitments made under the Paris Agreement. While this awareness has been translated into a number of ambitious local initiatives to ‘leave oil in the soil’, ‘coal in the hole’ and ‘gas in the grass’, hydrocarbon extraction at the global level has not in fact been declining. Decarbonization as a goal remains as utopic as it is unavoidable.

This tension between the seeming impossibility and concrete necessity of designating large shares of hydrocarbons as ‘unburnable’ requires urgent attention from political ecologists in at least two parallel streams of inquiry. The first concerns the process of transition away the contemporary centrality of hydrocarbons. This is necessarily a dual transition: away not only from a global economy that is dependent on fossil fuels but also from a global political system whose rules are dictated by state and capital benefiting from extractivism. The second stream has to focus on the shape of what is to come. The work of building a world where the ‘extractive imperative’ has been defanged, requires novel forms of political strategy, geographical criteria, and radical acts of imagination and solidarity.

To meet these analytical and political challenges, this panel will engage with these and other related questions:

• ·        Where and which resources need to be left untapped? Who should be empowered to make these decisions in a democratic yet urgent manner?
• ·        What are the institutional structures – economically as well as politically – that need to be constructed to compensate the socio-economic losses of right-holders as well as to resolve conflicts that will emerge at multiple scales? Can this transition be managed without creating centralized and hierarchical political structures that gather their legitimacy from the undeniable urgency of their task?
• ·        Who will be the main protagonists of this struggle? What forms of intersectional and global alliances are necessary and/or possible?
• ·        How does a world of unburnable fuels look like? What types of socio-economic, political and cultural changes are likely to emerge in the wake of a successful transition?
• ·        How geographical imagination and geovisualization can support the overcoming of petroleum-scapes, by defining geographical criteria, mapping unburnable fuels, and bridging disciplines for the climate justice debate.

Please send your abstracts by the 20^th of November to Lorenzo Pellegrini (pelle...@iss.nl) and Salvatore Eugenio Pappalardo (salvatore....@unipd.it).

[Kate Neville]

Dear GEP-ed colleagues,

Please see the call for papers below for a panel on citizen at the Dimensions of Political Ecology conference, planned for Feb 27-29, 2020, at the University of Kentucky (conference details here: https://www.politicalecology.org/). 

Submissions for the panel, along with any questions, can be directed to Alice Cohen: alice...@acadiau.ca.

There's a tight submission deadline -- conference participants must register for the conference by Dec 1, so Alice will confirm the panel by the end of next week.

Thanks and all the best,

Kate

-------

Dr. Kate J. Neville

Assistant Professor

Department of Political Science and School of the Environment

University of Toronto

kate.n...@utoronto.ca

 

 

Political Ecologies of Citizen Science (please see https://www.politicalecology.org/single-post/2019/10/29/Political-Ecologies-of-Citizen-Science for an electronic CfP):

 

This session explores the political ecologies of citizen science, or community-based monitoring (CBM).  Citizen science and CBM programs are increasingly popular models of environmental governance around the world and have been used to monitor a range of systems, including forests, water, fish, and climate.  Accordingly, a handful of review papers have sought to highlight the various benefits, challenges, and governance models associated with their uptake (see, for example, Bonney et al 2014; Carlson and Cohen 2018; Conrad and Hilchey 2011; Kosmala et al 2016; Whitelaw 2003). While these reviews have been pragmatic in their recommendations and in supporting scholars and practitioners in implementing and understanding the possible forms of CBM, they have largely been silent on the power structures implicit in these management and governance models.   Moreover, they say little on the ontological underpinnings of such systems, and often posit ‘science’ – homogenous, hegemonic, and apolitical – as the common language spoken by community members and policy makers. The literature on citizen science and CBM often presents the desired end goal as data sharing for policy making. This session problematizes these assumptions, and queries the social, political, and ecological implications of this ascendant model of resource governance.

To that end, this session seeks papers that explore the political ecologies of citizen science and CBM.  We are especially interested in theoretical or case-study based papers that examine any of the following:

• The funding arrangements (and their implications) for citizen science and CBM;
• Issues around the intellectual property resulting from citizen science;
• The relationship between Indigenous or Traditional Knowledge and citizen science or CBM programs; and
• The science/policy nexus in the context of citizen science or CBM programs.

 

Interested participants should send a 200-word abstract to Alice Cohen (alice...@acadiau.ca) as soon as possible. Participants must register for the conference by December 1^st.

 

With best wishes,

Alice

 

Alice Cohen, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Earth & Environmental Science

http://ees.acadiau.ca/cohen.html