‘Re-Imagining Our Sociological Contemporaneity: What is the Age of Re-Embodiments?’ - Symposium Announcement
Posted by Ruth Thomas-Pellicer on June 27, 2010 | 0 Comments
The Theory Study Group section of the British Sociological Association is supporting the symposium ‘Re-Imagining our Sociological Contemporaneity: What is the Age of Re-Embodiments? on July 16th 2010 in London so that the invited speakers engage in a preliminary attempt to define the theoretical implications of this Age.
Re-embodiment is a global social phenomenon. It is a popular and organized response against the excesses of Wester(nized) both modernity and postmodernity that also receives the firm support of international intellectual quarters and NGOs. These excesses are part of the colonial legacy. They are conspicuously epitomized in the international climate change regime.
Re-Embodiment cuts across the social and natural sciences and reassembles both. It builds on previous work on embodiment theory from as varied fields as 20th-century philosophy, environmental sociology, ecofeminism, political economy, ethno-ecology and human geography. Re-embodiment theory equally builds upon classical and post-structuralist social theory and philosophy.
This symposium is organized as a roundtable with six speakers. Two speakers open up the debate by attempting to define the Age of Re-Embodiments from the perspective of philosophy & social theory. Subsequently another two address the topic from the the domain of political ecology. Two ecofeminists close the symposium.
An edited collection named after the symposium with another seven invited papers shall mark the official opening of the theory around the Age of Re-Embodiments.
For further details see the booklet of the symposium.
VENUE
BSA London Meeting Room, Suite 2, Station Court, Imperial Wharf, Townmead Road, Fulham SW6 2PY
Entrance Fee
£20 for regular attendees, £10 concessions, to pay at the entrance on the day of the symposium. Book in advance as the conference room only sits 35 people.
Bookings & inquiries to Ruth Thomas-Pellicer.
Tags: Age of Re-embodiments > ecological debt > embodied debt > International Climate Change Regime > land and food sovereignity > modernity > postmodernity > The Sociological Imagination
The Age of Re-Embodiments in the Global Geopolitical Map
Posted by Ruth Thomas-Pellicer on May 27, 2010 | 0 Comments
Processes of re-embodiment are a global social phenomenon. They are a popular and organized response against the excesses of Wester(nized) both modernity and postmodernity that also receive the firm support of international intellectual quarters and NGOs. These excesses are part of the colonial legacy. They are conspicuously epitomized in the international climate change regime (ICCR). The ICCR draws a geopolitical picture with three major actors –a core, a semi-periphery and a periphery.
The ICCR & the Re-Embodiment of the Global Polity: An Ecofeminist Approach
Posted by Ruth Thomas-Pellicer on February 26, 2010 | 0 Comments
This kernel by Ruth Thomas-Pellicer proposes an ecofeminist methodology to critically analyse contemporary international regimes such as the climate one. This methodology goes by the retrieval of the etymological meanings of philosophia and scientia.This Nietzschean ‘transvaluation of values’ allows us to use and apply knowledge anew for the achievement of peace and equity. Key categories of analysis are loci standi & instrumenti movendi
Read The Re-embodiment of the Global Polity: An Ecofeminist Approach.
Tags: instrumenti movendi > International Climate Change Regime > loci standi > philosophia > re-embodying ecofeminism > scientia
Sustainability as (Neo)liberalism’s Trojan Horse in Ecocidal Times
Posted by Ruth Thomas-Pellicer on February 15, 2010 | 0 Comments
Ruth Thomas-Pellicer has published a critical reflection in the form of an Eco Pax Mundi kernel on the political and chrematistic role that the banner of SD/sustainability has been playing ever since it reached the international arena with the publication of Our Common Future in 1987. Ruth alerts us of the need not to get co-opted by the overarching banner. The ecological movement should keep its diversity and plural visions.
Read ‘Sustainability as (Neo)liberalism’s Trojan Horse in Ecocidal Times’
Tags: Age of Re-embodiments > Copenhagen Accord > ecocidal times > International Climate Change Regime > Kyoto Protocol > Sustainability
A Jubilee for Climate Justice as a Roadmap into the Age of Re-embodiments
Posted by Ruth Thomas-Pellicer on February 3, 2010 | 0 Comments
Ruth Thomas-Pellicer introduces this Eco Pax Mundi kernel with the following words: “In the wake of Copenhagen’s foretold failure, what is urgently required is a vision. This kernel aims at proposing in firm the Age of Re-embodiments as the Mecca to attain the twin climatic and social justice and thus exit the ecocidal mode of being. It further endorses two key Jubilee regulations in Leviticus 25 as set out in the Torah and posits both as a roadmap into this Age. The Age of Re-embodiments entails a way of relating with Tellus Mater which is not that proper of the mode of production. Rather, processes of re-embodiment exact wise engagement and interpenetration with the other creatures that dwell upon Tellus’ womb such as plants, trees and rivers. We shall call the latter mode of engagement. Access to the Age of Re-embodiments requires that the unfair relations of the mode of engagement epitomized in the International Climate Change Regime be cancelled. The restoration of equity is part of the spirit and letter of the Jubilee regulations”.
Read ‘A Jubliee for Climate Justice as a Roadmap into the Age for Re-embodiements’
Tags: Age of Re-embodiments > geoengieering > instrumenti movendi > International Climate Change Regime > Jubilee regulations > loci standi > Treaty for Climate Justice
Measures to Steadily Enter the Age of Re-embodiments
Posted by Ruth Thomas-Pellicer on February 3, 2010 | 0 Comments
There is some urgency for us to engage in an Age of Re-embodiments. Such an age exacts the re-embodiment of human tread on the Planet in ecocycles and biorythems alike. This is in particular necessary for the technologically-sillily-developed West.
A global process of re-embodiment is incompatible with carbon markets. Karl Polanyi’s political economy is outspoken that the market is inherently disembodied from ecological processes and disembedded from politics.
We need non-market solutions to exit Western ecocidal assumptions. As a first step to this end, Eco Pax Mundi has proposed a global jubliee or erasure of the unfair financial relations entrenched with the grandfathering of ‘rights to pollute’ to the industrial nations in the Kyoto Protocol. In our Jubilee for Climate Justice we then go on to propose a number of intermediate measures to progressively reach the Age of Re-embodiments.
Friends of the Earth – US proposes now to the Obama Administration another five steps to steadily enter the Age of Re-embodiments. These are:
1/ Stop subsidizing fossil fuels.
2/ Spearhead a bold “Marshall Plan”-style effort to fund solutions in developing countries.
3/ Build new rails, not new roads.
4/ Support local agriculture.
5/ Divorce politics from corporate power.
Tags: Age of Re-embodiments > carbon markets > Friends of the Earth > Jubilee for Climate Justice
Bolivia, Cultural Diversity & Ecofeminism
Posted by Ruth Thomas-Pellicer on February 2, 2010 | 0 Comments
BOLIVIA: Unprecedented Gender Parity in Cabinet
By Franz Chávez
“When he announced his new cabinet, Morales also said that Bolivian women’s social conscience, patriotism and dedication to defending national interests, as well as the respect he feels for his mother, sister and daughter, were factors in his decision to break with a long history of discrimination against women.
The female members of the cabinet include popular folk singer and activist Zulma Yugar in the Ministry of Culture; lawyer and former ombudswoman Nardi Suxo as the anti-corruption minister; U.S.-trained economist Elba Viviana Caro in the Ministry of Development Planning; Antonia Rodríguez, the head of an association of women artisans, as Minister of Productive Development; Nilda Copa, a leader of the Bartolina Sisa federation of peasant women of Tarija, in the Justice Ministry; and Carmen Trujillo as Minister of Labour and Social Security.”
The Ethics of Carbon Trading: Learn to Stand On Your Own Two Feet and Be Brave
Posted by Ruth Thomas-Pellicer on February 2, 2010 | 0 Comments
At the beginning of 2009 Clive Spash wrote a paper, The Brave New World of Carbon Trading, that was critical of carbon emissions trading schemes and argued redesign would not address the concerns raised. He was employed at the time by the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO), which endeavoured to prevent the paper from being published even in his capacity as a private citizen. The paper had been both internally and internationally peer reviewed, and was accepted for publication by New Political Economy, when CSIRO management first decided to prevent publication. After several months the issue became public and was the subject of debate in the Australian Senate. The CSIRO was forced to release the paper but first attempted to subject the work to serious alterations, to which Clive was asked to assent without making any changes. He felt that he could not agree. The journal New Political Economy also wrote to Senator Carr stating the changes made were so substantive that the paper was no longer equivalent to that which they had accepted for publication earlier that year. After six months attempting to seek due process there remained no internal recognition within management of any failure on their part or any breach of acceptable scientific practice. Despite considerable support from his colleagues Clive felt that he could no longer work within an organisation being run with such an approach to management and where arbitrary judgment over political sensitivities are employed to alter or ban research findings. He resigned his position.
Read Clive Spash’s A Brave New World of Carbon Trading
Read Ruth Thomas-Pellicer’s review of Clive Spash’s Greenhouse Economics: Value and Ethics
Tags: Brave New World > carbon trading > censorship > Clive Spash
Re-Imagining our Sociological Contemporaneity: What is the Age of Re-embodiments?
Posted by Ruth Thomas-Pellicer on January 24, 2010 | 0 Comments
Re-Imagining our Sociological Contemporaneity: What is the Age of Re-embodiments?
BSA - Theory Study Group Symposium
* * * * *
Call for Contributions
The topicality of climate justice is indisputable. Debates on the shape of post-Kyoto treaties for climate and social equity abound. Similarly, popular initiatives to set up tribunals to fight those responsible for climate forcing and reclaim ecological debts are on the rise. The goal is balance and equity whilst the issue that needs addressing is Man’s poor relation with his local and global environments.
Such a panorama tentatively depicts our contemporaneity at large. Namely, established institutions no longer know how to grapple with the question of Western Man and his externalized others -’nature,’ ‘women,’ ‘aboriginal man,’ ‘the sacred.’ This is a situation which obviously engenders much social and ecological unrest. Social theory largely partakes of this disconcerting tension. To be sure, a ruling body of modern categories appears surrounded by a constellation of critical responses that only in relation to the former endeavour to destabilize the prevailing –modern— canon. The postmodern condition is a conspicuous case in point. Whilst it manages to move away from the much-celebrated prowess of reason and it introduces much-needed perspectivism, postmodernity largely signifies the crowning of modernity. Theses such as ‘the end of history’ testify to this truism.
Against this background, this symposium posits that the tension at issue needs urgent recasting. Modernity –and, for that matter, postmodernity— is exhausted. Western/ised anthropocentrism no longer can operate as point of reference; it only entails systematic destruction of both cultural and biological diversity. No wonder that Man’s categorical position is in the course of being decentred. Man’s own developed abilities to both disembody his tread on the Planet from ecocycles and biorythmes alike, and disembed politics from bioregional constituencies are questioning his validity as point of reference. This is occurring in both praxis and theoria, as the findings and teachings from chiefly ecofeminism, Polanyian political economy and ethno-ecology attest.
While the challenge of disembodiment follows from the Neolithic Revolution and a fortiori the practice of metallurgy, it is a more recent series of industrial revolutions that have perilously intensified it: At what rates of dis/embodiment are human societies –or some of their groups— willing to operate in order to erect what kind of global civilization? The heightened ecocidal nature of our contemporaneity, to be sure, seems to prescribe that Western/ized societies engage in the opposite exercise and start re-embodying and re-embed their lifestyles. It may thus be wise to recentre theory around this process which popular struggles around the world have already initiated: we need a sociological imagination of the Age of Re-embodiments.
It seems, therefore, that to unthink our intellectual fetters and welcome this new spatiality, a root-and-branch debate akin to that which took place at the entrance of modern times is due. Just as eighteenth-century Germany asked ‘Was ist Aufklärung?,’ so too twenty-first-century critique should inquire: ‘What is re-embodying?’ ‘How shall social theory register and further hone the Age of Re-embodiments?’
1/ Can anthropogenic climate change be addressed with a disembodied, disembedded theoretical body: What is your proposal to embody and embed social theory?
2/ The adoption of an Age-of-Re-embodiments perspective recategorizes modern and postmodern theory as classical bodies of knowledge: Which classical authors offer leads on which to build the theoretical basis of this Age?
3/ How may this Age relate to classical theory: does the emerging link necessarily form a linear progression?
4/ Do we need a grand theory of the Age of Re-embodiments or rather a complementarity of piecemeal contributions? Are we aiming at an addition of disciplinary jargon and/or the creation of new categories of knowledge? Do we need to uphold disciplinary boundaries: sociology separated from anthropology, political science, ecology, etc., or should we aim at a counter- supra-discipline which emphasizes completely distinctive cognitive aspects, as for instance suggested by Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of the Human Sciences? Which cognitive aspects are relevant for the Age of Re-embodiments?
5/ Is nature/culture, and, for that matter, scientia/philosophia, a divide to keep abiding by? How does the re-embodiment of theory relate to (social) constructionism and (natural) realism? Which conclusions does sociology draw as it converses with ecology and other natural sciences, and which should ecology and other natural sciences draw as they interact with sociology?
6/ The re-enchantment of the world has often been spoken of as a prerequisite for re-embodiment. Is re-embodiment a profane and/or sacred affair? How do Emile Durkheim and Max Weber relate to the theory of this Age?
7/ What might be the role that non-Western/ized cosmologies play in re-informing social theory in this Age? What should theory learn from popular struggles for re-embodiment around the world? How is lay knowledge to re-inform social theory?
8/ How are we to map out power relations and monitor the steady, abrupt or absent global entrance into the Age of Re-embodiments?
9/ How is ecomarxism, largely concerned with production relations and the (re)distribution of capital, to reinscribe its theses in the prescriptive horizon of this Age?
10/ If dis/embodiment speaks of a finite qualitative continuum, it then implies that the production of knowledge and the exercise of critique must be one and the same endeavour —somehow completing the task initiated by the young Marx. Should this core of knowledge-critique be value neutral or does the Age of Re-embodiments need a cognitive reconstruction with an unashamed value basis? Which set of prescriptive values should the Age of Re-embodiments endorse?
11/ How is theory to tackle the reality of high levels of consumption in the cores vis-à-vis the heightened severity of ecocides in the peripheries?
12/ How is historical sociology to re/write its narratives and ethnographies from the angle and prescriptions provided by this Age?
The production of technology –a fortiori high-tech— entails appropriations of resources that go far beyond the area where the pieces of technology are being used as the work of, for instance, Alf Hornborg has pointedly noted. What are the implications of re-embodying technology and the science that informs it?
13/ What are the continuities and ruptures between the institutional project of sustainable development/sustainability and this Age?
14/ These are some of the circumstances –constraining and productive at a time— of our sociological imagination at present. Or so is the contention of this symposium.
Keynote Speaker
Dr. Ariel Salleh, University of Sydney, Australia, ‘Ecology and Materially Embodied Knowledge’ (tbc)
Speakers
Dr. Patrick Curry, University of Wales – ‘What is Enchantment?’
Dr. Larry Lohmann, the Corner House, ‘Climate Justice & the Social Sciences’ (tbc)
Vito de Lucia, Eco Pax Mundi, ‘The Re-embodiment of Technology in the Climate Regime’ (tbc)
Prof Mary Mellor, Northumbria University, ‘Embodiment & Ecofeminist Political Economy’
Ruth Thomas-Pellicer, University of Surrey – ‘What is Re-embodiment or the Victorious Assertion of Loci Standi over the Barbarism of Instrumenti Movendi.’
Prof Wendy Wheeler, London Metropolitan University - ‘Understanding the Sacred: Reason, Knowledge and Transcendence in the Age of Re-embodiments’
Participants
Entrance is free for BSA-members, and at a cost of £10 for non-members to be paid at the entrance on the symposium day. Note that the BSA London Meeting Room only seats 35 people. E-mail the convenor (r.thomas-pellicer@surrey.ac.uk) to make sure that there is a seat available for you.
Venue
BSA London Meeting Room, Suite 2,
2 Station Court,
Imperial Wharf,
Townmead Road,
Fulham SW6 2PY
http://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/meetingroom.htm
Edited Collection
This symposium should lead to an edited collection named after the title of the event. Speakers are expected to submit a 6,000-word paper.
Network of the ‘Age of Re-embodiments’
In this symposium it will be debated whether there is sufficient interest to establish the ‘Age of Re-embodiments Network.’ The main remit of this network should be the study of this overarching social phenomenon called re-embodiment that cuts across the social and natural sciences and largely recentres both. As the bullet points in the Call for Contributions suggest, the study of re-embodiment may be pursued from several angles. Members of this network would be obviously expected to contribute from the perspective of their research interests. It should indeed be network members that assign specific tasks and research commitments to this group. Our initiatives could also lead to individual and joint publications. Last but not least, the formalization of this network may enable us to obtain funding for our meetings and additional research activities.
Convenor
Ruth Thomas-Pellicer
Department of Sociology jointly with Centre for Environmental Strategy
University of Surrey
GU2 7XH Guildford (Surrey), England
r.thomas-pellicer@surrey.ac.uk
Land Reforms and Management of Natural Resources in Africa and Latin America Conference
Posted by Ruth Thomas-Pellicer on January 24, 2010 | 0 Comments
Panels scientific committee
PANELS PROPOSED TO THE SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
A meeting is being held for the report presentations of the following panels:
1. Economic development, land possession and poverty
Coordinators: Nuria Duperier, Gonzalo Ramírez de Haro
The panel concerning economic development, land possession and poverty will be directed at:
- Analysing to what extent agricultural reform processes have contributed to the reduction of rural poverty (and exclusion).
- Identifying the factors that explain the different results obtained by agricultural reform initiatives. Special attention can paid to the type of complementary measures (of training, credit access…) which accompany them.
- Analysing the “land reform” initiatives adopted recently (which in some countries attempt against the advances on the subject of land redistribution that had been made in the past) that cause in practice an increase in the concentration of land property.
- Studying how the processes of deruralization taking place in African and Latin-American societies are affecting the ownership and distribution of land.
2. Land reform and social movements
Coordinator: Víctor Bretón
The relationship between agricultural reform and the articulation of collective action organization platforms for rural populations is a remarkable subject that does not always receive the attention it deserves by researchers and analysts. The analysis will have to be examined in the panel with two perspectives:
- One in a historical view, analysing the importance that the demands for the agricultural sharing had in accord with the rural movements of the decades corresponding to classic “deveopmentalism” (the 60s and 70s).
- The other with a current or contemporary character, in the sense of deepening the ascertainable relationships between, on the one hand, the articulation of new organisation models (much of these revolve around ethnic identify and not explicitly concerning a class conscious type of discourse) and, on the other hand, the persistence of problems derived from the unresolved problems of land concentration and other resources in the age of neoliberalism.
3. Reviewing the tragedy of the commons: the viability of community management
Coordinators: Albert Roca, Marina Padrão Temudo
In 1968, Garret Hardin wrote the famous article “The tragedy of the commons” which, regardless of his later efforts to avoid simplistic interpretations of that work, became a sacred text in neo-Malthusian conservation efforts and in neo-liberal interventions on land tenure. The main assumption underneath them maintains that common property resource management could be sustainable at low population densities but open access to growing populations and unrestricted demand for a finite resource by competitive individuals will lead to over-exploitation and land degradation. Therefore, only privatisation could assure a sustainable use and investments for increasing productivity.
The sequence of events in many groups and societies has denied or nuanced Hardin’s approach. Communal resources management has often proved to be much more resilient than expected — not in the atavistic sense, but in the utilitarian sense that they are solving daily needs of local people — and extremely diverse. This resilience and diversity may lighten the general perspectives about land reform and about local or native knowledge in resources management, understanding that this knowledge and this land tenure are connected with the local social structures and power relations. The panel proposes a comparative and diachronic approach to the question.
4. Land reform and alimentary sovereignty: the new booms and their impact on the agriculture of the South.
Coordinator: Andreu Viola
Last year several studies documented a re-emergence of the world hunger phenomena. The land’s problem has been historically and structurally related with hunger, for which land reform and alimentary sovereignty are two inseparable goals.
During the last decade some new variables that are generating a considerable controversy have appeared. Some examples that we have proposed to analyse in this panel are as follows:
- The sale or rent of huge areas of agricultural land to foreign investors by several African and Latin American governments.
- The transgenic soybean crop boom. Its commercialisation means a frantic increase in deforestation, ground degradation, and pollution from agrochemical products; it is necessary to highlight the social conflicts provoked by an increasing concentration of land agricultural and the massive invasion of native territories and country properties by agribusiness interests.
- The quick increase in the worldwide production of agrofuels that presents new threats for alimentary sovereignty and rural population.
These situations delimit an interesting area of reflection and discussion, centring us on an impact analysis of these commercial booms that concern the possession and management of land, agricultural relationships and the feeding of the local population, as well as increasing interests and foreign capital in the agriculture of the South, separated by the territory and foreign to their needs.
5. International law and indigenous territories
Coordinator: Monica Martínez
In 1989, the ILO approved the Convention 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, and more recently, in 2007, the General Assembly of the United Nations approved the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The approval of these two legal mechanisms in an international context has marked before and after an agenda of indigenous collectives and populations as well as autonomous communities, a centred agenda recognizing access to their lands, territories and natural resources. In the American and African continents, in spite of their differences in the indigenous and autonomous conceptions, a legal process is taking place with very diverse results, for which regulatory precedents are being created concerning indigenous rights and reclamation of territories to give back to diverse groups.
In this panel we are interested in these processes and their effects on the local management of natural resources, as well as on the alternatives of legal procedures.
6. Market-led vs non-market oriented agrarian (land) reforms
Coordinator: Carlos Oya and Saturnino “Jun” Borras
The diversity of policies and actions that are encompassed under the “land reform” banner is very extensive and, in different cultural and historical contexts, different responses and adaptations arise. A key factor is the role that the market plays (in this case especially the land market in the distribution of assets, in the form of ‘willing seller-willing buyer’ redistribution arrangements) in each one of the policies mentioned. Openly productivist approaches can be distinguished in general in which land reform is basically seen as an improvement mechanism in the efficiency of land use, and in other cases, the fundamental goal of reform is rather social and political, focused on equity, for which the market as a resource assignment is problematic if not contradictory. Transnational agribusiness can also adopt alternative mechanisms for land access, which do not interfere with established land property rights, as is the case with contract farming, for example. The panel will approach these and other related debates, giving special attention to the evidence accumulated concerning land reform processes (fundamentally concerning land redistribution) that have followed a market approach (willing seller-willing buyer’).
7. Rural and farm women of the south
Coordinators: Juana Moreno and Asli Ocal
Ever since a few decades ago, the process of international commerce liberalization, the privatisation of agricultural production and the promotion of monocultures for export have been dismantling family agricultural productions, increasing the dependence and vulnerability of farmers that are impoverished and very often destined to abandon agriculture.
These macrostructural processes are not gender-neutral. The strength of patriarchal structures results in, according to the FAO, women making up 70% of people who are considered in absolute poverty in the rural world.
The objective of this panel is to know the new problems of rural women, interrelating the different spheres that affect their realities from a gender perspective. In the wake of this general objective, the following specific questions are presented:
- How do transformations in the modes of agricultural production impact rural women? What strategies are there on individual and collective levels that display rural women in this context?
- To what extent is it a context that offers new opportunities or is it a dynamic that reinforces, on the contrary, inequality between the sexes.
- How is the collective action organized concerning the situation of rural women?
Tags: food sovereignity > indigenous territories > international law > land possession > Land reform > social movements
