To address this opening, looking at  Northern Europe through a global environmental justice lens may illustrate how materials and politics entwine localities and make them cross-global. Such framings background notions of global leadership in environmental politics and foreground Northern Europe as a layered amalgam of globe-spanning localities composed of historical relationships, dialogue, domination, exchange, and extraction. While this approach allows for focus on Northern Europe, it also defines localities within Northern Europe as inseparable from—and altogether unknowable without—localities within the Global South. However, recognizing and mapping cross-global relations is not enough: Global visions of environmental justice movements demand alternative forms of living that are ecologically more sensitive and sustainable, yet are often peripheral. While Global North/South political boundaries are profound, similar boundaries emerge in local and national politics as well. Although alternatives for a yet-to-be present are sometimes met with curiosity, alterity in the form of multiple, locally specific, environmental modes of living and imagining are often foreclosed upon or overshadowed—intentionally and unintentionally—due to an emphasis on consensus over conflict and disagreement. All of this inspires a global environmental justice framework that maintains local particularity while holding onto an urgently needed global vision.

We are calling for a manifold of experts and artists (e.g. academics in the humanities and sciences, activists, community leaders, performers, etc.) who engage with environmental and climate justice, environmental-societal transformation and global connections, and consider new perspectives across differing knowledge practices and interfaces, temporal and political boundaries, and policy and societal nexi. Topics may include and go beyond: environmental struggle; supply chains and local effects; scientific models, reports and communities and local action; technologies and knowledge practices; alternative environmental living and imagining; cross-global conversation, commonality and/or collaboration; past & present environmental justice movements; Indigenous and alternative expertise; interdisciplinary collaboration.

Hosts

Aalborg University, Roskilde University, Aarhus University & the Independent Research Fund Denmark

Time

2 - 4 December, 2021

Venue

Copenhagen, Denmark (virtual/physical)

Contact

Dr. Malayna Raftopoulos-Chavarría
Associate Professor in Development Studies and International Relations/Latin American Studies | Department of Politics and Society

Phone: +45 99402865| E-mail: raftopoulos@dps.aau.dk