Dear all,
We have one or two places left on this session. Please send an abstract by
Tuesday, October 20th, the latest.
Many thanks,
Guy, Erik
CALL FOR PAPERS
American Association of Geographers Meeting, Washington DC, 14-18 April
2010
REAL WORLDS AND ENVIRONMENTAL VISIONS
Organisers: Erik Jönsson and Guy Baeten (University of Lund, Sweden)
While ’sustainability’ is slowly becoming an ’impoverished utopia’ (Garforth,
2008) that no longer can provide an overall and cohesive vision for organising
the relation between nature and society, and while ’market’ solutions are
systematically gaining prominence through for example climate negotiations at
UN and EU level, elite lobby groups in the UK and the US are promoting the
idea that ‘overpopulation’ is the definitive threat for the ‘survival’ of humankind
and its planet. This leaves us wondering how environmental visions either gain
dominance or lose importance, how they are generated, mobilised, used and
abused within a variety of contexts, and how they simultaneously stem from
and determine our knowledge of very real environmental problems.
This session welcomes papers that deal with the interplay between, on the
one hand, environmental visions, dreams, utopias, hopes, corporate agendas
and environmental ‘classics’, and, on the other hand, the materiality of the
actual production of nature. While this discussion ultimately goes back to the
old philosophical distinction between idealism and materialism, we seek to
unravel the power of ideas in the production of nature and, vice versa, how
the process of the production of nature generates environmental visions,
through grounding them in contemporary empirical understandings of the
society-nature relation. The session would like to shed more light on the very
processes through which environmental visions are formed, disseminated,
implemented, popularized, invoked by interest groups, and how they ‘find their
way’ into policy and legislation, landscapes, land use, resource use, and other
forms of the real environmental world. By looking at concrete cases of the
production of nature (projects, policies and politics), the session would like to
contribute to a better understanding of how environmental visions gain
prominence and dominance, how they can lose hegemonic status through
contestation, what that means for real natures, and how, in turn,
contradictions within real natures generate competing visions for solutions.
We welcome papers that deal with one or more of the following topics:
• Envisioning places: the formation of contradictory discourses around
environmentally controversial development projects (major tourist resorts,
major infrastructure works, etc)
• How do resistance movements generate, mobilize and promote
alternative environmental visions ?
• The power of notions of environmental ‘justice’, and how they
compete with capital interests
• The potential of ideas to contest capital interests and the potential
of capital interests to appropriate, incorporate and transform environmental
concern
• The role of the media, popular culture, lobbying and science in
envisioning environmental futures
• The impact of alarmism on policies and scientific work, and people’s
perceptions of ‘nature’; the significance of the doomsday industries
• The impact of environmental ‘classics’, from The Population Bomb to
Silent Spring, on the process of environmental envisioning
• Assessing the optimism of ecological modernization and its impact
on the construction of ‘real worlds’
Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to Erik Jönsson
(erik.jö[log in to unmask]) or Guy Baeten ([log in to unmask]) by Tuesday,
October 20th.
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