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Call for papers - Race and climate change workshop, 27 February 2019

A one-day workshop event followed by a public roundtable session at Birkbeck, University of London, Wednesday February 27 2019.

This one-day event offers a space for considering how ‘race’, ‘racialisation’ and ‘racism’ operate as key terms of reference within the political, cultural and economic contexts of climate change. However, whereas ‘climate justice’ is often understood as the sanctioned space for discussions about race and climate change, this event broadens the scope by asking how and to what extent ‘race’ organises the more encompassing discourse of climate change, including its epistemologies (i.e., the history of climate change, climate science, mitigation, adaptation/resilience, geoengineering, justice/law), its institutions (i.e., UNFCCC, IPCC, Green Climate Fund), its geographical imaginaries (i.e., North/South, West/East, developed/developing, settler-colonial/Indigenous), its aesthetic genres (i.e., cinema, cli-fi, media), and its ontological forms (i.e., catastrophe, crisis, apocalypse, futurism). Consequently, the event is set up to grapple with the tension between the racialisation of climate change discourse and the racialised global structures and processes which contribute to a warming world and generate its differential effects on communities across the globe. How this tension plays out in relation to the intersectional dimensions of climate change (i.e., gender, class, and sex/sexuality) is also of paramount concern.

We invite contributions from scholars working on themes related, but not limited, to: Indigeneity, whiteness, blackness, migration, Afrofuturism, Afropessimism, development, the Anthropocene, settler colonialisms, critical race theory, political economy/ecology of oil and gas extraction, postcolonial theory, political theology, race and the international, queer ecology, biopower/geopower, climate change as a racialised object, climate change and fascism and/or the alt-right, and political geology.

Participants are invited to submit 200 word abstracts to any member of the organising committee:

The deadline for submitting abstracts is 14 December. Acceptance notifications will be sent shortly thereafter.

With support from the Population, Environment and Resources (PER) group at Birkbeck and the Colonial, Postcolonial, Decolonial Working Group.