In the unfolding climate crisis, two questions loom large in the search for planetary justice: What is a radical politics of work in an era of climate crisis? What is a radical politics of nature in an era of disposable workers and precarious work?

Through Working Environments, Unruly Natures, the 2020 meeting of the World-Ecology Research Network speaks to the work/life nexus of planetary justice. Highlighted by recent calls for a Green New Deal and Degrowth, we will explore the intimately connected – and profoundly global – dimensions of work, workers, and life across the long history of the capitalist world-ecology. Recognizing the dialectic of productive and reproductive work as the pivot of modern environment-making and class formation, we invite paper and session proposals that unpack the connective relations between work, working bodies, and working environments – past, present, and future. We especially welcome proposals that situate capitalism’s mobilization of paid and unpaid work in their racialized, gendered, colonial, and multi-species moments. This includes the deep history of labor politics, working class protest, and social revolution in their connections with world-ecological crises and capitalist restructuring. Identifying the strategic relations between neoliberal dispossession, proliferating climate disasters, and widening indequality, Working Environments, Unruly Natures pursues new syntheses, narratives, and conceptualizations of twenty-first century crisis that can inform the emergent politics of planetary justice.

The World-Ecology Research Network is a global conversation of academics, activists, and artists committed to understanding human relations of power, production, and environment-making in the web of life. An evolving conversation rather than a theory, the world-ecology approach is unified by a critique of Nature-Society dualisms, a world-historical interpretation of today‘s planetary crisis, and an emphasis on the porous and constituting relations of race, class, and gender in capitalism‘s environmental history.

We are happy to work with artists and activists to develop creative ways to present their work in ways that may differ from conventional academic presentations. As always, some of our keynote speakers will be drawn from accepted abstracts.

• If you have any questions, please email worldecologyconferences@gmail.com
• You can visit the WERN website https://worldecologynetwork.wordpress.com/about/
• or our conference website https://worldecologyconferencesblog.wordpress.com/
• Please join us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/worldecology/
• and follow us on Academia.edu https://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/World-Ecology

Important Dates

Abstracts Due            February 20, 2022              Submission form here.

Program Available      May 25

Conference                  June 8-10, 2022