First Call For Papers: Is "sustainable living" possible? People, society, and nature in Chinese societies

  Dear colleagues, Please find below the call for paper for a panel that I will be chairing next year 27-29 May 2016 at the British Museum in London. The panel is part of a major conference entitled "Anthropology, Weather and Climate Change", organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute. Our panel is looking for two more paper presenters and a discussant. The deadline to submit a paper proposal is 8 January 2016.  All paper proposals must be submitted through this page: http://www.nomadit.co.uk/rai/events/rai2016/panels.php5?PanelID=3781 If you are interested in joining us as a discussant, please email me at iengtak.lou@anthro.ox.ac.uk to express your interest.  The official site of the conference: https://therai.org.uk/conferences/anthropology-weather-and-climate-change-2016 Please note that there is a Conference Fee for joining this panel: Non-Fellow: £180RAI Member: £160RAI Fellow: £95Concessions: £75RAI Student Fellow: £50 Thank you for your attention, I look forward to hearing from you! Best wishes,Loretta I. Lou    D.Phil Candidate in AnthropologyUniversity of Oxford   

CALL FOR PAPER

Is "sustainable living" possible? People, society, and nature in Chinese societies

 Chair:Loretta Ieng Tak Lou (University of Oxford)   Decades of unrestrained development has made China's environmental degradation as breathtaking as its economic miracles. Sustainable development and effective enforcement of pollution control remain a challenging task in most parts of China. However, a number of recent studies have shown that a grassroots "green movement" is under way in Chinese societies. As Chai Jing posed the question in her influential documentary about air pollution in China, Chinese citizens, especially the emerging middle class, have lost the patience to wait for the government to respond to the problem. More and more citizens choose to address their concerns about pollution, climate change, and the social, political, and moral ramifications of rising neoliberal values through the means of religion, art, music, vegetarianism, self-cultivation, sustainable farming, ethical consumption, corporate social responsibility (CSR), social entrepreneurship, green credits, and numerous mundane everyday practices like BYOB, recycling, cleaning one's plate, etc. Unlike environmental protests that have the potential to become a political upheaval, such interventions rarely catch the attention of the media as they tend to emphasizes cooperation, communication, and individual change. This panel brings together scholars whose work focus on agency and the formation of "environmental subjectivity" in the broadest sense. In exploring the rich ethnographic accounts of these bottom-up interventions in contemporary Chinese societies (including work about Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, etc.), we ask if sustainable living is possible through such interventions by reflecting on their implications for civil society, green capitalism, authoritarianism, and the global environmental movement.