Call for proposals:
Environmental Justice in Multispecies Worlds: Land, Water, Food
An interdisciplinary graduate student conference hosted by the
Center for Culture, History, and Environment
University of Wisconsin–Madison
March 6-8, 2020
The Center for Culture, History, and Environment invites participants for an interdisciplinary graduate student conference to be held March 6-8, 2020, on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which occupies ancestral Ho-Chunk land. This conference emerges from a multi-year conversation across departments at UW-Madison concerned with meanings of social and environmental justice in what Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser have called a “world of many worlds.” Inspired by work on Indigenous cosmopolitics, multispecies ethics, feminist and postcolonial studies, and racial capitalism, we seek to understand the following questions:
How have histories of colonial and capitalist exploitation shaped contemporary configurations among humans and other beings? How do class, racial, ethnic, gender, and other politics shape multispecies encounters? How can recognizing multiple forms of life reframe techno-scientific management? What might constitute environmental justice in the pluriverse? How might attention to Indigenous cosmologies and multispecies ethics redefine the politics and structures of environmental justice? Is justice an apt framework for engaging relationships among humans and other-than-humans?
We invite participants to join and extend this conversation, bringing methodologies and perspectives from across the humanities and social and natural sciences to explore key themes of climate justice, settler colonialism, decolonization, racial capitalism, sovereignty, food justice, democracy, rights, more-than-human worlds, among others.
Featured speakers include
- Marisol de la Cadena, Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies, University of California–Davis
- Kyle Powys Whyte, Professor of Philosophy and Community Sustainability, Michigan State University
- Cleo Woelfle-Erksine, Assistant Professor, School of Marine & Environmental Affairs, University of Washington
Participate via Writing Workshops, Organized Panels, Individual Papers, and Roundtables. For more information on submission details and selection criteria, please see our website at multispeciesjustice.org. Submissions are due by 5pm Central Time, November 15. Hope to see you here!