CfP: RGS-IBG 2020: Historical geographies of environmental futures
Historical geographies of environmental futures (sponsored by the Historical Geography Research Group (HGRG) of the RGS-IBG)
Call for papers: Royal Geographical Society with IBG Annual Conference, London, 1-4 September 2020
Elliot Honeybun-Arnolda (University of East Anglia) and Martin Mahony (University of East Anglia)
‘The future’ has recently risen to new prominence in geographical, historical and cultural inquiry. In geography, attention has focused on how threats to liberal-democratic forms of life are anticipated and acted upon (Anderson 2010), on the politics of expertise in the construction and definition of knowable futures (Derrickson and MacKinnon 2015; Lave 2015; Kurniawan and Kundurpi 2019), and on the role of geographical scholarship in richly imagining alternative futures in a period of environmental crisis (Braun 2015; Kama 2019). In this session we are interested in building on recent conversations (e.g. Hodder et al. 2016) about the role that historical geographers can play in interrogating, reconstructing and expanding the spaces and places of future making, particularly as they pertain to contested visions of environmental futures. How societies have collectively imagined ‘the environment’ and its futures – for example as a fragile connective tissue between disparate social and natural worlds (Warde et al. 2018), or as an interconnected and potentially controllable global system (Edwards 2010) – has had material consequences for the unfolding of environmental change. The question of who gets to envisage and define the future, and who doesn’t, is one of urgent political importance. Historical geographers have much to contribute to understanding why some visions of environmental futures gain traction while others may not, and how science, societies and environments have been re-made as certain future visions have either risen to prominence or remained hidden from view.
This session aims to bring to light diverse visions of environmental futures, to understand their relationship to the spaces and places from which they emanate, and to make sense of their transformation over time. We are keen to expand the range of sites which has until now featured in the literature on the ‘history of the future’, which has tended to focus on formal institutions in the Global North. We welcome contributions which engage with future-making practices not only in science, policy and industry but also in NGOs, education, and religious and social movements, and which examine practices from numerical modelling and scenario-building to prophesy and divination.
We invite submissions that engage with the following, or related, questions:
· How and why have particular visions of environmental futures gained traction, or failed to do so, in different times and places?
· How have dominant visions of environmental futures channelled political action in certain directions?
· What is the relationship between the spaces in which future-knowledge is constructed, and the spaces that such knowledge helps produce? For instance, how have claims about environmental futures featured in practices of colonialism, bordering, or territorial contestation?
· Environmental futures before ‘the environment’ – how can the conceptual history of the environment help us to refine our understanding of the genealogy of the future?
· How has the discipline of geography historically functioned as a site of environmental future-making?
· What is the impact of past future-making practices on present-day environmental discourse? How can expanding our appreciation of the historical geographies of environmental futures help diversify the kinds of socioecological transformations which are open to contemporary societies?
Please send abstracts to Elliot Honeybun-Arnolda and Martin Mahony by 10th February.