Announcing Our 2012 Conference!
The Peace and Justice Studies Association, in conjunction with the Tufts Initiative on Climate Change and Climate Justice, announces its 2012 annual conference…
“Anticipating Climate Disruption: Sustaining Justice, Greening Peace”
October 4-6, 2012
Tufts University
The Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA) Conference Committee invites submissions for its 2012 Annual Meeting, to be held on the campus of Tufts University, in Medford, Massachusetts (Boston metro area), from Thursday October 4 through Saturday October 6, in conjunction with the Tufts Initiative on Climate Change and Climate Justice. We welcome proposals from a wide range of disciplines, professions, and perspectives on the many complex issues now unfolding amidst disruptive climate change, which promises to be among the most significant social justice concerns in the 21st Century.
The fundamental premise of anthropogenic climate change is that it is endogenous to how we live and to how we organize our societies. Virtually every aspect of how we carry out our daily existence is a contributing factor. Simultaneously we are learning how climate change is increasingly impacting life on Earth. If not every species, certainly a preponderance of social and ecological systems are experiencing its impacts.
A fundamental injustice of climate change is that it most greatly affects those who are least responsible for causing it. That climate disruption will have disproportionate impacts morally obligates us to consider how our socioeconomic structures and cultural systems dynamically combine in determining who suffers and how much. That the perceived threats of social instability from extreme climate events, as well as now-increasing conflicts over stressed resources, are leading to security scenarios for maintaining current social orders and appropriating any economic benefits similarly obligates us to search for sustainably just solutions.
Thus, this conference will focus on examining the social systems within which our responses to disruptive climate change are unfolding, in terms of both mitigation and adaptation. It will investigate how these social systems contribute to the concentration of costs and climate damages among poor communities and vulnerable households. It will examine the disproportionate appropriation of benefits by powerful actors, including elites, industries, institutions, militaries, and the wealthiest countries. It will also pay close attention to the on-the-ground experiences with alternative solutions that are effective, just, and sustainable. And it will explore movements and local struggles in resisting “business as usual” policies and practices.
Plenary sessions will address the militarization of responses to climate change in the name of security; health priorities and consequences; food vulnerabilities and injustice; peace economy and green energy; and water justice. Throughout those overlapping and interrelated concerns, gender analysis will be integrated with that of race and class, and the “social autopsy” of those who most suffer or are threatened will be highlighted.
A guiding objective of the conference will be to investigate and reveal how real solutions to climate change must necessarily challenge the injustices of political economy and militarism at every governing level. Thus, we aim to explore how organizing for climate protection and resilient communities contributes to global justice. We seek analyses of case-specific responses to and struggles over schemes of climate change adaptation and mitigation. Whether as local challenges to corporate influence or as nonviolent confrontations with security state policies and planning, what people-power campaigns and constructive programs are now underway or are being planned? Importantly, what opportunities are being advanced by collective and innovative endeavors for a just sustainability?
Proposals for the conference are due by April 1, 2012. For more information, see the Call for Proposals.
