The GLO team will be convening two panels at the forthcoming Royal Anthropological Institute/Royal Geographical Society conference in London (4-7 June 2020). Enquiries and proposals are very welcome! Panel details and information on applying are below…
1: (Re)scaling the Anthropocene
Organisers: Hannah Fair and Viola Schreer (Brunel University London)
The Anthropocene has been described as a profoundly ‘scalar project’ (Hecht 2018), in which (inter)personal, local, regional, national, global, and planetary scales constantly emerge and collapse. Emerging from social, cultural, economic, technopolitical, and scholarly processes, scales are mutable, function discursively yet have material effects: they reveal and conceal; they support political claims; and they both define and defy disciplinary boundaries.
This panel brings anthropologists and geographers into dialogue about how a focus on scale can produce more nuanced understandings about the Anthropocene and enrich different disciplinary perspectives. Concretely, we ask: how we can productively make use of (re)scaling both as object of analysis and a methodological device to explore how the Anthropocene is experienced, contested and negotiated across multiple settings? How can (re)scaling help anthropology to bring its traditional focus on the local to engage with the planetary? How does the Anthropocene reconfigure relations between the human and the non-human at multiple levels? How can such a rescaling be mindful of the conceit of the Anthropos as a universal subject position (Nixon 2017), and bring decolonial, feminist and queer analyses into its understanding (Davis and Todd 2017)? What distinctive tools and perspectives can more-than-human geography and multi-species ethnography bring to these questions?
We are particularly interested in papers that sit at the intersection of anthropology and geography and address the question of (re)scaling in the Anthropocene. Possible topics could include (but are not limited to):
Conservation
Rewilding
Extinction
Engagements with non-human others
Climate Change
Disasters
Toxicities and waste
Digital Natures
Abstract submission: CFP closes 8th January 2020. Proposals should consist of a paper title, a (very) short abstract of <300 characters and an abstract of 250 words. Please submit abstracts to https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/rai2020#8290. Any questions please contact hannah.fair@brunel.ac.uk or viola.schreer@brunel.ac.uk.
2. Hedging bets in more-than-human worlds: joint futures of veterinary and conservation interventions
Convenors: Ludek Broz (Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences) and Liana Chua (Brunel University London)
As more-than-human regimes of value and governance, veterinary and conservation interventions overlap and intersect in numerous ways. For example, veterinary care is often key to conservation projects, such as endangered species monitoring programmes and rehabilitation centres that aim to ‘return’ rescued animals to ‘the wild’. Veterinary authority and logics also legitimate biosecurity measures that seek to protect ‘native’ flora and fauna from ‘invasive’ species. Both fields, moreover, are constitutively structured around anticipatory devices, such as pre-emptive biosecurity restrictions, programmes for vaccinations, euthanasia or reproduction, and predictions of likely population trends.
We invite panellists to ask how the future in conservation and/or veterinary medicine serves as a ‘guiding trope in the present’ (Nielsen 2014), and on what temporal scales it is located, or indeed evacuated (Guyer 2010). We seek contributions that empirically/ethnographically flesh out how the two fields (separately or jointly) build their capacity to imagine, foresee, speculate, and predict, so as to intervene, act upon, enact, precipitate or prevent different versions of the future. Specifically, we encourage curiosity about the structural, political, imaginative and other means through which the two fields build authority and hedge their bets on various futures—particularly in situations where there is a significant risk of failure or being proved wrong.
Abstract submission: CFP closes 8th January 2020. Proposals should consist of a paper title, a (very) short abstract of <300 characters and an abstract of 250 words. Please submit via https://nomadit.co.uk/rai/rai2020/conferencesuite.php/paperproposal/8349. If you have any questions please contact broz at eu.cas.cz or liana.chua at brunel.ac.uk.