197. Solidarity in Crisis: Towards new Ecologies of/for Environmental Justice Research
James Adams, University of California, Irvine; Ian Ferris, University of Texas, Austin;
Environmental crises are produced ecologically, at the tangled nexus of climatic, biological, sociotechnical, political, economic, and epistemic systems. Accordingly, efforts to understand and redress these crises should be similarly configured--across scales and systems--to be effective. Thus, we seek studies of climate and environmental in/justice that employ expansive considerations of solidarity as a more-than-human mode of relationality, spanning across sociocultural and ontological differences. Contributors are also encouraged to bring in discussions of diverse processes and topics, not often analyzed in terms of environmental in/justice, but where deeper scrutiny reveals clear entanglements. Our intended purpose here is to begin cultivating new ecologies of scholars, frames, and interests, within and beyond STS, for researching and pursuing environmental and climate justice.
Like the iconic clenched fist, solidarity often conjures images of the fixed, the homogenous, and the tightly organized. In practice, however, solidarity is often messy and unstable. It's dispersed. It demands unlimited finitude, an uncountable conglomeration of difference. Analogously, ecological frames of analysis are notable for the way they intensify (rather than reduce or ossify) relationality, often blurring the very boundaries between the milieus, flows, and forms of life that ecologies relate. In this vein, we seek contributors from the humanities and social sciences with a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds and with varying degrees of specialization in the study of environmental or climate justice. Ultimately we hope that this panel will demonstrate a model of exploration and collaboration that will encourage other and further justice-oriented and ecologically-minded partnerships.
