Call for Book Contributions: “Geographies of Labour in a Changing Climate”

 

*With the usual apologies for cross-posting*

 

Climate change is now a firm part of global consciousness. However, critical perspectives have shown how the discourse surrounding it runs counter to the rights and interests of the world’s most vulnerable workers, eliding contemporary differences between North and South in deference to the rights of ‘apolitical, placeless, future citizens’ (Chaturvedi and Doyle, 2015: 46). Seeking to oppose this grand narrative of climate change, climate justice scholars draw economic and social inequalities into its analysis in a manner that the “objective” discourse of climate change scholarship has often failed to address.

 

From this position, changes to the climate – both long and short term – are not experienced directly but through the lens of working life. Those experiencing climate change are not atomistic entities, but connected agents, deeply embedded within global systems: as market traders or factory workers; rural farmers or civil servants. The changing climate does not therefore mean changing weather, but changing terms of work. What was once sufficient for personal and family needs may no longer be so in a new environment, meaning reduced quality of livelihoods, longer working hours and a greater vulnerability to exploitation by employers.

 

This book aims to bring together insights from a range of contexts to explore this situated experience of climate change, highlighting how life and work within global production networks combine to determine its experience. Abstracts are invited which provide cutting-edge research in the Global North and/or South. Themes could include (but are not limited to):

 

• The experience of work in a changing climate
• Labour rights and the climate
• Justice, legality and the changing climate
• Climate change and global production networks
• Climate change and uneven development

 

We are looking for titles and abstracts of 300 words to be sent to Laurie Parsons ([log in to unmask]) by the 4^th of October 2018.