We invite abstracts for a workshop on “Making Future(s): Green alternatives and STS Interventions” which will be held at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, 24-25 November 2017. The workshop is funded by the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST).
During the workshop we want to reflect on problems of environmental degradation and its threat to livelihoods. Remedies to such problems come predominantly in the form of various techno- and market-fixes. Eco-modernist perspectives shape mainstream politics and policies with regard to environment. A good example is the Breakthrough Institute’s Ecomodernist Manifesto (Adafu-Adjaje et al., 2015). Many agendas advocate capitalist ‘acceleration’ in the name of going beyond the current system. These would develop technologies ‘which free us from biological and environmental constraints’, as well as from conventional work (Srnicek and Williams, Accelerationist Manifesto 2013 and Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, 2015). Amidst policy frameworks promoting new infrastructure for economic growth, alternatives propose ‘green infrastructure’ in various forms (e.g. The Case for Green Infrastructure, 2013).
However, alternative visions of the future and solutions to environmental challenges have also been proposed by social movements, local communities and different other kind of social groups and groupings. For example, social movements demand environmental justice and ‘system change’. A number of local communities and indigenous peoples, both in the global North and South, have devised lifestyles according to alternative cosmologies that try to escape capitalist notions of nature, politics and economics. The concept of buen vivir, good life, have become something more than just a slogan inviting to join a consumerist comfort. It has taken shape as an anti-capitalist and environmentalist agenda.
STS has a potential to critically engage with the dominant visions in order to advance politics of creating our common future. Through this workshop we aim to advance STS theoretical and methodological interventions into both reflecting on and making ‘green futures’. The main questions to engage with are:
(1) What theoretical and methodological approaches in STS have proven to be most fruitful for studying how various visions of ‘green futures’ are made and how they stabilize into social orders? We are interested in conceptualizing technologies for making ‘futures’ and ‘the predictions of future’, new agencies, as well as new socio-technical orders, their scales and temporalities.
(2) How can we advance the current STS approaches to studying the making of the future(s)? How to analyse the various socio-political constructs of the ‘uncertain’ and ‘green’ futures that dominate the discussion about creating what comes after the present?
(3) What concepts of nature, technology and society underlie these visions?
(4) How do various remedies for the environmental crisis engage with the neoliberal order of contemporary capitalism, either by strengthening or subverting it? In other words, we are also interested in the politics of making diverse future(s).
Deadline for abstracts of 300 words, proposing theoretical, empirical and methodological interventions, is May 15th, 2017. Abstracts should be submitted by e-mail to ALL THREE email addresses: Aleksandra Lis alis@amu.edu.pl [1], Agata K. Stasik stasik.agata@gmail.com [2] and Małgorzata Kowalska malgorzata.kowalska@amu.edu.pl [3]
Successful applicants will be notified by June 30th, 2017. Full paper drafts should be submitted by November 1st, 2017. A post-workshop publication of the papers is planned. All paper-giving participants will be hosted at a university housing facility for up to two nights. A limited number of travel bursaries is available upon request.
The organizing team comprises of local and international scholars actively shaping the field of STS: Aleksandra Lis (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland), Małgorzata Kowalska (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland), Piotr Matczak (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland), Agata Stasik (Koźmiński University, Warsaw, Poland) Les Levidow (Open University, UK), Luigi Pellizzoni (University of Pisa),
Invited speakers: Ingmar Lippert (IT-University of Copenhagen)