Call for Papers now open:



Rethinking Agency and Sustainability in Relation to the Intimacy of the Ordinary

AAA Annual Meeting, Washington DC, 3rd-7th of December 2014



This panel addresses theoretical and empirical considerations of the relationships between approaches to sustainability and conceptualizations of agency. We ask what can be gained through a focus on intimacy and ordinariness as a context in which agency and sustainability are being made meaningful. How does the anthropologist enter into these relationships and how does she/he make knowledge about the intimacy of others?

The last two decades have seen alignments between environmental sustainability focused on localism (Castells 2001; Pink 2009) and smallness (Kohr 1957; Schumacher 1973) and a range of neoliberal governing techniques centered on individualism and personal responsibility. Policy measures addressing domestic energy demand, renewable energy technologies and waste shift the emphasis, silently, from the necessity of deep political and economic structural changes to the individual responsibility of the ‘green’ citizen. This rewrites the public/private divide in new ways, as feminism and cosmopolitanism did before it (Dobson 2009). The duty of the new environmental citizen is now to live sustainably in private and public. Centered on discourses of moral goodness and personal carbon calculation (Giradet 1992) in this model, the agency of the ‘green’ citizen is a form of ‘neoliberal agency’ that involves conscious usage of a ‘means-end calculus’ (Gershon 2011: 539).

Ethnographic research, however, has the capacity to de-center this approach, by paying attention to local definitions of sustainability and by finding agency in the domain of the ordinary (Das 2007) and in other than conscious acts, such as hope (Miyazaki 2004) and imagination (Moore 2011).

This panel aims to explore new ways of conceptualizing and articulating sustainability and agency by inviting paper contributions around the themes of: ethnographic collaborations in climate change mitigation; domesticity as a site for agency; articulations between concepts of sustainability and concepts of time; non-human agencies and climate change.



Please send your 250-word abstracts to either of the organizers by 4th of April 2014.

Roxana Morosanu:

School of Social, Political and Geographical Sciences, Loughborough University,

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Jane Dickson:

Department of Anthropology University College London,

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