[gep-ed] FW: Call for Papers and Proposals: EJCSU to host "Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene"

[Betsill,Michele]

(apologies for cross-postings)

Call for paper and session proposals
Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene
Symposium, 24-25 April 2017, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, USA
Proposal deadline: November 1, 2016



Environmental justice is a central component of sustainability politics during 
the Anthropocene – the current geological age when human activity is the 
dominant influence on climate and environment. Every aspect of sustainability 
politics requires a close analysis of its equity implications, and 
environmental justice provides us with the tools to explore the ways in which 
we define and investigate the Anthropocene and its multifaceted impacts. From 
its origins as a US movement against environmental racism and other inequities 
in the early 1980s the scope of environmental justice, as a field of research 
and as a movement, has broadened enormously as shown in the Environmental 
Justice Atlas and evidenced by many other initiatives around the world. Global 
EJ activism and research, in fact, is moving beyond demanding equity in the 
distribution of environmental harms and benefits to a call for the structural 
transformation of the economy and our relationship with nature as a means to 
address social, political, economic and environmental crises.

Environmental Justice CSU[1], the organizer of this symposium, is a global 
challenges research team sponsored by the School of Global Environmental 
Sustainability. Like its sponsor, EJ CSU is multidisciplinary and multiscalar 
and committed to rigorous research and public engagement.

This symposium aims to bring together academics, independent researchers, 
community and movement activists, and regulatory and policy practitioners from 
across disciplines, research areas, perspectives, and different countries. Our 
overarching goal is to build on several decades of EJ research and practice to 
address the seemingly intractable environmental and ecological problems of this 
unfolding era. How can we explore EJ amongst humans and between nature and 
humans, within and across generations, in an age when humans dominate the 
landscape? How can we better understand collective human dominance without 
obscuring continuing power differentials and inequities within and between 
human societies? What institutional and governance innovations can we adopt to 
address existing challenges and to promote just transitions and futures?




Themes include:


1. MULTI-DISCIPLINARY FACETS OF ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE:
In recent years, EJ research has enriched the study of an array of 
environmental issues.  Increasingly, scholars and practitioners of EJ are at 
the forefront of recognizing that individual environmental issues are 
inexorably linked. What do we know about EJ with respect to particular 
environmental issues? In what ways can EJ help us understand dynamics and 
relations across issue areas and disciplines? How can we infuse 
transdisciplinary methods more fully into the EJ research agenda? As a citizen 
science, how can EJ integrate collaborative methods that recognize the role of 
social movements as creators of knowledge and engage in methodologies that 
entail a more symmetrical approach to research?


2. JUST TRANSITIONS:
Environmental justice research has also found its way into the study of green 
transitions and their impact on work and workplaces and across value chains and 
production networks.  Do the challenges of the Anthropocene justify any green 
initiative, at the expense of workers and communities, or do the challenges of 
the era require more just and democratic governance? How should unions, 
communities and those most vulnerable respond in the absence of a policy of 
just transition? How can we ensure that the workplaces and the communities 
engendered by green transitions are both green and just?  How and at what scale 
should we confront this challenge? In what ways can insights from related 
investigations, such as those of rights, democracy and governance enrich our 
understanding of just transitions?


3. JUST FUTURES:
Environmental justice can also inform how production and consumption can be 
reorganized to address the challenges of the Anthropocene in a 
socio-ecologically just manner. The transformative vision of EJ can be 
productively informed by indigenous cosmovisions and decolonial scholarship, as 
well as heterodox approaches such as ecological economics. Is growth an 
inexorable necessity for achieving social and environmental justice or should 
we engage more deeply alternative visions of political economy, political 
ecology and governance? How can we better communicate about just futures with 
students and practitioners with diverse backgrounds and priorities? What are 
some of the visions, policy proposals and transformative remedies emerging from 
those struggling for EJ that can help reshape the political-economic structure 
behind injustices?



Submission Process and Logistics:

We are inviting 

[gep-ed] 2017 AAG CFP: Making a Resource: Science, Legal Frameworks, and Political Economies of Shale Fuels

[PSU]

Apologies for cross-posting

Making a Resource: Science, Legal Frameworks, and Political Economies of Shale 
Fuels 

Jennifer Baka, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Penn State 
University
Elvin Delgado, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Central Washington 
University
Matthew Fry, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, University of North 
Texas
Arielle Hesse, PhD Candidate, Department of Geography, Penn State University
CfP sponsored by Energy and Environment Specialty Group

“Resources are not: they become.” In only a few words Erich Zimmerman (1933) 
captures the objective of contemporary resource geography: to study how 
resources emerge from a multitude of forces that intersect at certain moments 
in particular places and across specific regions to produce goods and services 
for society. However, how these environmental, technological, legal, social, 
and political economic forces coalesce around shale fuel deposits has yet to be 
fully explored. Despite a decade of commercial scale production and a growing 
body of social science literature within cognate disciplines, to date, few 
geographers have extended a particularly geographic and empirical analysis of 
how such forces converge to make shale resources. In particular, few studies 
have examined the role of science, technology and legal frameworks in enabling 
(or constraining) the commodification of shale. The goal of this paper session 
is to address these research gaps by examining: 1) the ways in which shale 
deposits are territorialized and commodified; 2) how commodification processes 
differ across shale basins and/or from past instances of energy resource 
commodification; 3) how science and new technology contribute to making shale, 
including the role of reserve estimates, hydro-fracturing technology, waste 
production and disposal, and science communication; 4) how legal frameworks and 
emerging laws and regulations utilize scientific knowledge to enhance or limit 
shale commodification; 5) how commodification processes, laws, and science 
influence shale governance and territorializing processes; and 6) the political 
economic implications associated with the commodification of shale deposits. 

We welcome contributions from all theoretical perspectives. Priority will be 
given to empirical case studies.

Please send abstracts (300 word max) to Jennifer Baka (jeb...@psu.edu 
) by Friday, October 14, 2016. Decisions will be made by 
Friday October 21, 2016 (in advance of the abstract submission deadline on 
October 27, 2016). 


Dr. Jennifer Baka
Assistant Professor
Department of Geography 
The Pennsylvania State University
317 Walker Building
University Park, PA 16802
Tel: 814-865-9656
Email: jeb...@psu.edu



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[gep-ed] Post doc on Environmental Justice and Sustainable Peace at Sheffield

[Forsyth,TJ]

Sheffield University in UK are recruiting for a 2 year post doc, start date is 
January 2017, working with Dan Brockington and Rosaleen Duffy on the topic of 
environmental justice and sustainable peace. There is considerable scope for 
the successful candidate to shape the post doc around their own research 
interests.  Please see: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AOO759/research-associate/

Please contact them, not me!

best wishes, Tim


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