Canadian Association of Geographers (Virtual) Conference, 7-11 June, 2021
Call for Papers: Critical Geographies of Canadian Wildfires
Organizers: Adeniyi Asiyanbi (University of Calgary), Conny Davidsen (University of Calgary), Colin Sutherland (University of Guelph)
Concerns are growing about current and future wildfire risks to Canadian society in the face of environmental and socio-political change, prompting important questions for critical geographers. These questions draw attention to the diverse objectives, interests and relations that converge around wildfires as spatio-temporal processes that are, at once, ecological, social, cultural and political. The eminently socio-political nature of fires is evident in how they get understood, experienced and mediated in ways that reflect differences of human-environment conceptualizations, political views, class, race and gender. As such, critical, including intersectional analyses can reveal how discursive meanings, uses and the range of responses to landscape fires are bound up with often unequal relations over time and across space. These historically and geographically contingent relations that make fires possible (and impossible) are constituted and mediated by humans and more-than-humans, institutions, culture and economy.
While historical fire management policies and practices continue to have implications for current practices, climate change-related projections of Canadian wildfires warn of increasing wildfire severity into the future. Moreover, the long and uneven history of fire suppression on the Canadian landscape and contemporary attempts to “return” fires highlight the tensions between the settler approaches to fire management and Indigenous fire practices that rely on fire’s active role on the land. As scholars of fires show, such tensions are related to issues of power, cosmology, colonialism, territory, resource extraction, state-making and place-making. Critical geography is well placed to deepen analyses of these issues. Such analyses are critical at a time when diverse and often competing visions for managing fires and governing fire-society relations lend renewed significance to debates about risk, resilience, security and environmental sustainability. Building on existing work, geographers are positioned to offer unique perspectives on how, where and with what effects these competing visions of (desirable) fire futures are being negotiated, enacted and contested.
This panel invites critical geographical work including empirical, theoretical and review papers on wildfires and broader landscape fires in the Canadian context. Indicative themes include:
· Conceptualizations of wildfire, risk and resilience
· Wildfire governance and neoliberalism
· Discourses and practices of wildfire preparedness
· Critical perspectives on wildland-urban interfaces
· Political ecology of wildfires and landscapes that burn
· Indigenous fire knowledge and practices
· Fires, colonialism and decolonization
· Critical perspectives on prescribed burning
· Critical perspectives on firefighting
· Critical perspectives on forest industry fire practices
· Political economies of wildfire prevention and/or suppression
· Forest fires and climate change mitigation
· Uncertainty and fire futures
· Environmental histories of fire management
Please send a 250-word abstract to Adeniyi Asiyanbi ([log in to unmask]), Conny Davidsen ([log in to unmask]) and Colin Sutherland ([log in to unmask]) latest by March 10, 2021.
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