Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration – call for papers

The Political Ecology Network (POLLEN) Third Biennial Conference will be held in Brighton, United Kingdom on 24-26 June 2020 on the theme of ‘Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration‘. POLLEN 2020 is organized by the ESRC STEPS Centre (IDS/SPRU, University of Sussex) and The Political Ecology Network (POLLEN) Secretariat (based at Lancaster University 2017 -2019; and moving to the University of Copenhagen 2019 – 2021). The conference is co-hosted by Radical Futures at the University of Brighton, with support from the BIOSEC project (European Research Council) and SIID at the University of Sheffield.

Submission deadline: All proposals must be submitted via online form by 31 October 2019.

The contested notion of ‘nature’ is one of the central themes in political ecology, and the conference aims to explore plural natures and plural futures as sites of struggle and possibility whilst critically engaging with and ‘unpacking’ multiple and overlapping crises of our times. The conference will be structured to encourage critical reflection around the entanglements and encounters of political ecology with a variety of approaches and philosophies from post-structuralism and Marxist to anarchist, feminist and queer perspectives – the ways of knowing, seeing, representing, challenging that often define our work.

To these ends, POLLEN20 will combine the objectives of a traditional meeting with the collegiality and dynamism of a less structured, more participatory gathering. As is outlined in the call for proposals, we encourage proposals for themed sessions in a variety of conventional and novel formats, aspiring to bring together perspectives and ways of sharing from across disciplines and geographic traditions, welcoming dialog with our allies within and outside the academy.

Please refer to the Call for session proposals for more information on the conference theme, structure and guidance on submitting session proposals. All proposals will be reviewed by a panel and registration will open in early 2020.

Conference news, updates and CfPs will be announced here and on the POLLEN website.

Inquiries about the conference or questions about contributions to the Solidarity Fund for travel bursaries can be sent by email to POLLEN@sussex.ac.uk (please note that this is not the email address for the POLLEN secretariat).

More information on the conference is available here.