Call for Papers- Power, Profit, and Planetary Life: The Global South and Socio-Ecological Liberation in the Capitalist World-Ecology, Ninth Annual Conference of the World-Ecology Research Network, Jakarta, July 20-22, 2023

Call for Papers- Power, Profit, and Planetary Life: The Global South and Socio-Ecological Liberation in the Capitalist World-Ecology

Ninth Annual Conference of the World-Ecology Research Network, Jakarta, July 20-22, 2023

The climate crisis amplifies longstanding inequalities of power and wealth in global capitalism. For over a half-century, the “environmental” question has been central to contentious world politics, framed by growth, sustainability, development, and justice. Growth. Sustainability. Justice. Development… For whom? And in what configuration(s)? As the deepening climate crisis leads to new proclamations of a “climate emergency” coupled with calls for “Green New Deals,” new conditions of constraint and possibility emerge. What are the opportunities for states and movements to pursue an egalitarian climate justice strategy that challenges the Global North’s extraordinary concentration of wealth and power?

This conference explores and reconstructs the socio-ecological relations of power, profit and life that have governed combined and uneven development since 1492. We welcome all manner of contributions narrating and conceptualizing the socio-ecological relations that have created, reinvented, and reproduced North-South inequalities. Proposals may emphasize small or large geographical scales, over long or short temporal frames. In line with world-ecology’s critique of the disciplines, scholars from all fields are welcome. Proposals should engage, in whatever way is most reasonable for the topic, contemporary biospheric crisis and its historical development. They should, moreover, directly address key historical and conceptual themes of the world-ecology conversation: https://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/World-Ecology. Where there are differences, these should be stated openly as an opportunity for debate. Proposals that seek to amplify, revise, extend, and transcend major concepts in the world-ecology conversation through historical and empirical argument are especially encouraged.

Please find the submission form HERE and on our CONFERENCE WEBSITE. Important dates below.

Key topics include:

• • Commodity frontiers.
• • Bandungs, Old and New.
• • Capitalocene to Proletarocene
• • The environment-making state.
• • Crises, developmental and epochal
• • Food justice and food sovereignty.
• • Superexploitation in the web of life.
• • Compradors and counter-insurgency.
• • Waste, toxification, and overpollution.
• • Cultures of imperialism and anti-imperialism.
• • Environmental histories of (anti-)imperialism
• • Debt crises, financialization, and currency wars.
• • The rise of China and the One Belt, One Road.
• • Environmental and planetary justice movements.
• • Unpaid work/energy and accumulation by appropriation.
• • Development, Developmentalism, and Green Revolutions.
• • Sustainability and the specter of green austerity, 1972-present.
• • Militarized accumulation and the political ecology of capitalism.
• • Colonization and decolonization (and so-called neo-colonization).
• • Geopolitics of North-South relations in the crisis of Cheap Nature.
• • Semi-proletarianization and the fate of peasantries in the Global South.
• • “Good Science,” empire, and the anti-politics of planetary management.
• • The structures of knowledge, the disciplines, and structures of world power.
• • Class configurations in the global south: biotarian, femitarian, and proletarian
• • Permanent war as an environment-making process and relation, north and south
• • The capitalogenic trinity: the climate class divide, climate apartheid, climate patriarchy.
• • Civilizing Projects and ruling abstractions, from Columbus to the Washington Consensus.

We welcome paper and panel proposals on these and other themes relevant to the world-ecology conversation. Presentations can be in-person or video recorded.

The World-Ecology Research Network is a global conversation of academics, activists, and artists committed to understanding human relations of power, production, and environment-making in the web of life. An evolving conversation rather than a theory, the world-ecology approach is unified by a critique of Nature-Society dualisms, a world-historical interpretation of today‘s planetary crisis, and an emphasis on the porous and constituting relations of race, class, and gender in capitalism‘s environmental history.

We are happy to work with artists and activists to develop creative ways to present their work in ways that may differ from conventional academic presentations. As always, some of our keynote speakers will be drawn from accepted abstracts.

If you have any questions, please email worldecologyconferences@gmail.com.

You can visit the WERN website https://worldecologynetwork.wordpress.com/about/,

or our conference website https://worldecologyconferencesblog.wordpress.com/.

Please join us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/worldecology/,

and follow us on Academia.edu https://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/World-Ecology,

PROTOCOLS

Abstracts should be between 500-1000 words. Registrants will have the opportunity to provide a longer abstract for the conference. Please find the submission form HERE and on our CONFERENCE WEBSITE. Presentations will be 15-20 minutes.

The time difference between Jakarta and the locations of so many WERN researchers in Europe and the Americas is six to 12 hours. Internet connections in Jakarta are notoriously unreliable. At our 2022 fully hybrid

conference we experienced all manner of user error, scheduling and technical difficulties. It is for these reasons that we have chosen to run video panels for participants who are unable to come to Jakarta.

Video presentations are only for those who cannot come to Jakarta. Your recorded video presentation will run at the conference during our video panels. Questions and comments will be recorded and sent to presenters at the end of the conference.

All plenaries and panel sessions will be streamed live. Links will be shared the week of the conference.

IMPORTANT DATES:

Abstract submission: thru April 15, 2023

Notification: rolling, no later than April 25, 2023

Registration: April 1 – July 5, 2023

Conference dates: July 19-21, 2023