Anke Kläver bei der EnJust Conference 2024 in Hamburg: Re-politicizing urban transformation – urban planning between injustice and post politics

EnJust Conference 2024 – 21.-23. November 2024 in Hamburg

Environmental Justice in the Age of Planetary Peril:
Concepts, Agencies, Mobilizations

EnJust Conference 2024 will delve into a key tension of current sustainability and climate politics: the juxtaposition between the perceived urgency for immediate techno-managerial interventions to combat environmental degradation and climate change, and the increasing proliferation and mobilization of social movements and their claims for justice. As such, climate policies and decarbonization efforts, like energy transitions, are predominantly embedded in discourses of technological solutionism, security, and neoliberal governance that could foster forms of post-fossil extractivism and green colonialism, thereby exacerbating the marginalization and neglect of justice concerns. Nevertheless, justice claims are becoming increasingly visible, both politically and academically, as movements intensify their struggles for socioecological (and technologically just) transformations and develop new institutional strategies to enable alternative sustainabilities. In line with this, the conference will critically interrogate the adequacy of environmental justice conceptualizations in the face of multiple planetary threats, especially pertaining to the worsening impacts of climate change. In this regard, there are calls for a more comprehensive inclusion of non human agencies and planetary forces in justice conceptualizations and legal frameworks, such as “planetary justice” or “earth system law”. In addition, postcolonial scholars call for a profound decolonization of environmental justice, emphasizing the need for greater epistemic and ontological plurality within respective studies and climate action.

By combining inter- and cross-disciplinary perspectives with creative and experimental approaches, the conference will explore the extent to which current claims for environmental justice are compatible with technological approaches needed to combat climate change and environmental degradation. Moreover, building on discussions at the EnJust Conference 2023 in Chiapas, Mexico, it will critically examine existing and emerging justice conceptualizations, and asks what approaches are appropriate and necessary to enforce environmental justice in the age of planetary peril. Therefore, the conference serves as a common space of reflection to discuss emerging concepts, agencies, and mobilizations of environmental justice and invites contributions that address issues such as:

• Attempts to rethink environmental justice, new (or neglected and marginalized) approaches to and perspectives on environmental justice and environmental law
• The emergence and conceptualization of new agencies (e.g. youth movements, non-human agencies) centered around environmental strategies for enforcing justice
• Tensions between climate / environmental justice and an increased securitization of climate change and environmental issues
• Deliberations on meanings and sources of environmental security (e.g. between states, within states, outside of the state system, between actors/groups/ initiatives)
• The consolidation of extractivism and resource depletion through neoliberal policies of debtand austerity
• The influence of (diverse forms of) climate knowledge on policy strategies
• Threats posed to democracy both by massive environmental degradation and rapidtransformation processes
• The deterioration of and need to rethink democracy in the planetary age
• The justice implications of emerging climate technologies such as geoengineering, negative emission technologies or carbon capture and storage
• Convivial and emancipatory technologies
• Environmental conflict (e.g. due to infrastructure-induced displacement) and environmental peacemaking (from below)
• The implementation and legislation of the rights of nature

Besides theoretical and empirical conference papers, we are particularly interested in experimental and creative interventions that aim to bridge art, activism and academia (e.g. activist interventions, artistic performances or exhibitions).

The conference is an in-person event, although individual formats such as keynote lectures may be streamed digitally to enable a wider audience. Active participation therefore requires travel to Hamburg. If you do not have your own funding, there is the possibility of a travel subsidy by the EnJust network / University of Hamburg. If this is the case and your participation would depend on a subsidy, please indicate this in your submission.

For questions regarding the content of the conference, please contact: Benno Fladvad (benno.fladvad(at)uni-hamburg.de) or Svenja Mc Grath (svenja.mcgrath(at)uni-hamburg.de).

For questions regarding the EnJust network please contact Kim Nierobisch or Clara Lüpke (enjust(at)geographie.uni-kiel.de).

The EnJust 2024 Organizing Committee