Call for contributions for a special issue of the Revista Crítica de
Ciências Sociais
“Ecological Crisis and the New Challenges for Democracy”
Conveners: Stefania Barca¹, Giovanni Allegretti¹ and Laura Centemeri²
¹ Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra (PT)
² LAMES (CNRS-AMU), Aix-en-Provence (FR)
Although the ecological crisis is increasingly raising global
concerns, there is no consensus as to its social and political
implications. The environment is, therefore, a symbolic and material
playing field, largely dominated by reductionist approaches
(technocratic and / or economistic), often unaware of the social
dimension of environmental issues, where inequality of the impacts and
damages (especially in socio-economic terms) is a particularly
important aspect. On the other hand, most new social movements, as
well as a growing number of "experts" have expressed a vision of the
environmental crisis as manifestation of a social crisis of global
dimension. Environmentalism, in fact, is not just a matter of "urgent
resolutions" in technical and/or managerial fashion. There is today a
non-mainstream environmentalism and environmental justice movements in
both the North and the South of the globe, which act upon the
perception of an organic unity between environmental and social
inequalities.
New theoretical tools have been developed over the past 10-15 years,
within the Social Sciences and Humanities, allowing to analyze
environmental issues in a less dichotomous and more comprehensive
fashion than in the past, beyond usual opposition such as that between
environment and society, nature and culture. This call for
contributions aims to bring together papers that utilize critical and
analytical tools that come from the following research areas:
Environmental Justice, Public Health, Ecological Democracy (or
Citizenship), Ecological Economics, Political Ecology, Environmental
Sociology, Eco-Criticism, Environmental Sociology and Environmental
History. The contribution of this issue will therefore be to gather a
set of these new approaches to offer a critical reflection on the
contemporary environmental crisis.
The suggested topics to be addressed by contributions are:
1. Economic crisis, (de)growth and (un)sustainability (e.g.,
productive restructuring, “relocalization”, eco-solidarity economy,
ecological social networks).
2. Migration and environment (mass dislocations arising from: dam
constructions, natural disasters, climate change, depletion of natural
resources, national parks, urban regeneration policies, environmental
policies and anti-immigration policies).
3. Urban and peri-urban agriculture (food security, healthy food,
sustainable agriculture).
4. Bio-cultural diversity (e.g. traditional seeds and medicine, local
knowledge, collective ownership).
5. Social impact of new public health risks (e.g. climate change,
GMOs, trafficking of toxic waste).
6. Environmental racism (i.e.: charging environmental costs on
indigenous populations, ethnic minorities, African descendents).
7. Mega-projects (e.g., communications, mining, energy production) and
environmental conflicts.
8. Mobilizations against the privatization of resources (water, seeds,
landscape, etc.).
9. New narratives and new languages of the ecological crisis (e.g.
‘the inconvenient truth', national environmental security, green
washing, environmental and climate in-justice).
It is hoped that the contributions address the different topics paying
attention to two transversal axes of inquiry, namely: the interaction
between local and global, with particular focus on what each question
implies in terms of North-South relations; and challenges and/or
opportunities that each issue poses to democracy and social
emancipation.
Proposals should be received by September 31, 2012 at the address
rccs@??? and should include: title, abstract (900 characters
max.), full paper (which must not exceed 50,000 characters with
spaces), brief biographical note (500 characters max.) of the
author(s) and an authorization for publication. All details at
http://www.ces.uc.pt/rccs/normaspubrccsen.pdf.
The conveners will give notice of the acceptance by the end of October
2012. The RCCS is a peer-reviewed journal published by the Centre for
Social Studies of the University of Coimbra. It publishes articles in
Portuguese and Spanish, but it will always be possible to submit
proposals in English, French or Italian. If accepted for publication,
articles will be translated into Portuguese.
Website RCSS:
http://www.ces.uc.pt/rccs/index.php?id_lingua=2
