CALL FOR PAPERS:
NIES Research Symposium VII
Environmentalism, Spatiality and the Public Sphere
Oslo, Norway, September 27–30, 2012
Keynote Speakers
Lawrence Buell, Harvard University, author of The Environmental Imagination (1995), Writing for an
Endangered World (2001) and The Uses and Abuses of Environmental Memory (forthcoming)
David Nye, Odense University, author of American Technological Sublime (1994), Consuming Power: A
Social History of American Energies (1997), and America as Second Creation: Technology and
Narratives of New Beginnings (2003)
Edward Soja*, UCLA, author of Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined
Places (1996), Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (2000) and Seeking Spatial Justice
(2010)
The rise of environmental studies across different disciplines in the natural and social sciences, and more
recently the humanities, is an acknowledgment that nature, as material and biological force, plays a larger
and more fundamental role in human history and society than often previously acknowledged. By
addressing the dimensions of spatiality in human experience, environmental studies has the potential to go
beyond the emphasis on externalities often signaled by the term “environment” (i.e. the understanding of
the surround as merely conditional, a circumstance that must be responded to, managed and overcome), to
arrive at new insights regarding how the environment (as expressed, for instance, in social practices,
belief systems and modes of living) helps us to reconceive / reinterpret what it means to be human.
At the same time, and despite what we might see as a deepening academic discourse in environmental
studies, environmentalism both as a socio-cultural movement and as a set of policy options seems to have
lost its forward momentum in the past 20-30 years. Schellenberger and Nordhaus’s provocative study
“The Death of Environmentalism” (2005) calls into question both the scope and strategic merit of
contemporary environmental discourse. As any problem of knowledge is also a problem of audience,
there remains the question of how environmentalism might better construct, address, or include various
publics, and to what extent, if at all, environmental studies in the academy can help facilitate that process.
The end of substantive environmental reformism in the USA during the 1980s, for instance, reflected the
growing insignificance of national politics and national culture as instruments of political reform.
Environmentalism and the environmental movement must now respond to the terms of the real global
economy in light of an evolving understanding of the interdependence of human societies and natural
ecosystems, amidst mounting evidence of global climate change. The question now confronting
environmental activists, and indeed environmental studies scholars/researchers, is whom their work and
*
Not yet confirmed.
efforts should seek to engage, and in what ways they should/can address various actors that constitute
publics. In both of these questions matters of space and place are pertinent, indeed essential, in defining
the boundaries of publics (as polities, communities and indeed audiences) and in asserting discursive and
political priorities. This has particular importance in light of the ever more prominent integration of
environmental discourses in the media sphere, where contested environmental/ist images and narratives
have become a commonplace.
A common spatial starting-point in environmentalism holds that local place and global space must have
priority. In this perspective, environmentalism is an ideational system of concepts, values, beliefs and
world views resting on sensibilities of place and the earth as a common life space. Such a standpoint has
implications regarding where relevant publics lie and how to address them. At the same time efforts to
more broadly conceive of the public sphere have presented problems that reveal lost opportunities. For
example, turn-of-the-20th-century conceptions oriented toward recollecting a “usable past” as the means of
achieving a common memory could be appropriated for nationalistic purposes contrary to an
environmentalist ethic and spirit or they could be activated to forward environmentalist ends. The long
prevalent environmentalist sensibility toward place may also fit uncomfortably with a world in which
goods and people are increasingly mobile. On the other hand, contemporary western political discourse
(mired in an unproductive political discussion between clumsy, lock-step “globalization” and idealized
nationalistic localisms) may still yet provide a useful entry point for a reconstituted or reinvigorated
environmentalism in line with 21st century political realities and material conditions / ecological
circumstances.
We invite contributions from scholars in all fields that address the spatial dynamics of environmental
political concerns in relation to the public sphere. We are particularly interested in papers that address one
or more of the following themes:
• Discourses of globality or globalization and regionalization
• Discourses of place and space
• Marginality v. centrality
• Productions of locality and questions of scale: city, region, nation
• Nature, space and the Sacred
• Space, place and nature in religious traditions and new religiosities
• Conceiving/re-conceiving the public through space, landscape or place
• Economic inequalities, resource exhaustion and place identity
• Urbanization and de-urbanization
• Rural decline / transformations
• Conceiving space and place in the climate change discourse
• Media iconographies and master narratives of environmentalism and/or environmental issues
• Public space and/or (natural) commons
Submissions are welcome from scholars based anywhere in the world, but are particularly encouraged
from scholars in the Nordic countries. Please send your abstract (no more than 150-200 words) and a very
brief (one-page) CV to Mark Luccarelli ( mark.luccarelli@ilos.uio.no ) not later than 1 May 2012. You
will be notified regarding the status of your submission by the end of May 2012. Those selected to present
papers will have their lodging and board provided by the symposium organizers for up to three days and
nights in Oslo. Participants’ home institutions are expected to cover the costs of their transportation to and
from the symposium. In the event that their home institutions cannot subsidize their travel, presenting
participants may be eligible for support from NIES to help defray travel costs if the trip takes place within
the Nordic countries.