CfP, 2nd call: Re-worlding: Pluriversal politics in the Anthropocene.
Aapo Lunden
Dear colleagues,
with apologies for cross-posting.
This is the second call for papers for this year's Nordia Geographical Publications theme issue: Re-worlding: Pluriversal politics in the Anthropocene. Please see details attached below.
Please feel free to get in touch with any questions and proposals that you might have. We would also appreciate it if you could forward it to anyone who might be interested to contribute.
Deadline to send the abstracts is March 31st.
The full call with instructions for submissions can be accessed here: https://nordia.journal.fi/announcement/view/337
Best wishes,
Aapo and Carlos
Call for Papers
Nordia Geographical Publications Theme Issue 2021
Re-worlding: Pluriversal politics in the Anthropocene
Aapo Lunden (Oulu) & Carlos Tornel (Durham) (eds.)
The Geographical Society of Northern Finland and the Geography Research Unit at the University of Oulu are inviting contributors to the Nordia Geographical Publications Theme Issue coming out in late 2021 with the topic Pluriversal Politics in the Anthropocene. The Nordia Geographical Publications is a peer-reviewed, open access academic journal focusing on contemporary conversations and openings in Geography.
In describing the world experiencing accelerating change and multifaceted overheating, the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2016) portrays contemporary times through powerful endings like the end of cheap nature, the end of traditional political thought and the end of overarching generalizations. The exhaustion of neoliberalism and the double bind that emerges from a relentless pursuit of economic growth and sustainability is leading to increasingly tangible forms of social and environmental unsustainability. Therefore, there is an urgency not only to move away from growth as we know it and reclaiming the commons, but for broader civilizational changes and transitions (Escobar, 2015; Kallis,et al., 2020).
Moving beyond modernity’s ever-expanding faith in forms of technological and market-based fixes, “solutionisms” (Morozov 2013) and the trust in hacking our way out of trouble has become an imperative. Hence, new political strategies are needed to foregroundontological politics and the multiplicities of differences or ‘otherness’ instead of a binary or apotheotic thinking (Rose 2013). In order to conceptualise space for these necessary transitions, there is a need “to build on the notion of multiple realities and possibilities implicit in the agenda of many social movements'' (Escobar, 2020). Turning to such realities, or pluriversal politics, means engaging with multiple dialogic methods to ‘enhance appreciation of multiple ways of knowing and being in the world (...) that decenters models of science and development that have been portrayed as universally true and good (Paulson, 2018: 85).
Moreover, we aim to depart from recent debates seeking to ”name the system” in academic discussion mainly between framing our current epoch as the Anthropocene (Moore 2015; Boneuil and Fressoz, 2016). While we see these discussions as a fruitful starting point, we instead turn our interest to the multiple scales of change and follow Hylland Eriksen’s approach in scaling down to the middle-ground. Here we are interested in conceptualizations that provide stronger multi-scalar linkages between the macro and micro, the global and the local (Hylland Eriksen, 2018) to analyse environmental and social changes in times of increasing shared and particular planetary vulnerabilities (Mbembe, 2020).
We invite authors to contribute in populating themiddle-ground and discuss thepluriversal and ontological politics of the Anthropocene. We welcome the conceptual and theoretical, as well as empirical examples that describe living and thinking in times of environmental and social change, linking macro-micro level changes to specific contexts and geographies. The topics of the contribution include, but are not limited to:
· Multiple scales or multi-scalar clashes in the Anthropocene (Hylland Eriksen, 2016);
· Strategies, case studies and the politics of reclaiming the commons, resisting terricide (Escobar, 2020) and ecocide in the content of new and old forms of extractivisms (Dunlap, 2020);
· Conceptualising the double bind of economic growth and sustainability from different scales, places and mobitilities (e.g., in the fields of conservation, tourism, or natural resource governance, (see: Buscher & Fletcher, 2020);
· Assessments of the COVID-19 pandemic and planetary degradation as a crisis of life (syndemic and other combinatory concepts);
· Empirical examples and case studies of pluriversal politics in the global North or the global South, highlighting synergies and strategies for transitions and ontological politics (Escobar, 2015);
· Strategies and experiences that explore and engage with the ‘decolonization of the imaginary’(Latouche, 2009);
· Empirical and/or theoretical contributions exploring the contributions to ontological politics to broader conceptualizations of political economy or political ecology;
· Problematizations of “plastic words”, development schemes and new versions of environmental “high modernity” (Scott, 1998; Sachs, 2018) through anti-political perspectives;
· Transitions that aim to articulate changes from ‘predatory’ to ‘sensible’ or ‘essential’ forms of extractivism (Brand, 2020);
· The multiple ways that the environmental movements (new and old) can engage with pluriversal politics in the Anthropocene.
The contributions can take the form of:
· Peer reviewed research articles (ca. 6000–9000 words), academic essays or review articles (ca. 3000–6000 words).
· Editorially reviewed interventions and discussions (ca. 2000–4000 words).