Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Maike Melles
(Institute of Ethnology CAS)
Daniel Sosna (Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences)
Petr Jehlička (Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Workshop
Short Abstract:
This workshop focuses on temporalities of resource use beyond the futuristic and productionist timescape of Green Growth. How may the commoning of long-established yet marginalised ideas and diverse temporalities help to un-common dominant views of sustainability in political and academic discourse?
Long Abstract:
Sustainability encompasses various strategies and practices mobilised by public and private actors to mitigate the harmful effects of capitalistic forms of value extraction. To tackle the overconsumption of resources and exploitation of people and environments, policies promote the reuse and recycling of materials within circular economies, while researchers eagerly develop technological and (socio)economic improvements. With its emphasis on innovation in the service of upcoming generations, sustainability seems to enjoy an appealing temporality: It is up to date and firmly geared towards the future, thereby usually overlooking long-established examples of sustainability. In other words, rather than undermining techno-scientific futurity (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015), sustainability in its dominant form blends perfectly into the productionist timescape of Green Growth.
Engaging with a productive tension between commoning and un-commoning, this workshop focuses on temporalities of resource use which do not succumb to the logic of productionism. We invite contributors to engage with diverse temporalities of sustainability, which include, but are not limited to, seasonalities, ancestries, (un-)certainties and (im)probabilities. Commoning yet disregarded practices and temporalities of sustainability foregrounds human-environment relations that may be informal, acquire meaning not primarily in economic terms, engage care-fully with nonhumans, and mobilise diverse cultural repertoires. Overarching questions of this workshop concern the epistemic stakes of anthropological research on sustainability: What do commoning and un-commoning mean for understanding and practicing sustainability? What are their mutual tensions, forms of coexistence, and limits? How may the commoning of marginalised wisdom help to un-common dominant views of sustainability in political and academic discourse?
Accepted contributions:
Contribution short abstract:
The dominant notion of sustainability is characterized by an anthropocentric ontology and a linear conception of time. Drawing on a case study with Maya-speaking maize farmers in Mexico, this paper contrasts their logics for biocultural diversity conservation with the fundamentals of sustainability.
Contribution long abstract:
As is perhaps most prominently manifested in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, “sustainability” is meanwhile a highly influential concept – not only in international politics but also in daily life. Despite its specific European origin, it seems to have a universalistic claim dictating how ethical human-environment relationships should look around the globe. However, the concept originated and largely developed in the Global North has its limitations. Above all, the dominant notion of sustainability seems to be characterized by an anthropocentric ontology and a linear conception of time. Accordingly, intergenerational environmental justice entailed in the concept tends to focus almost exclusively on the present generation’s obligations to human beings living in the immediate and/or near future. However, this ontology implied in the universalized sustainability discourse is by no means common. Drawing on Maori and Aboriginal philosophies, Christine J. Winter (2022) for example argues that indigenous understandings of intergenerational environmental justice is more integral, encompassing more-than-humans and spanning past, present and future generations. In view of these differences, the scholarship in the anthropology and beyond calls for “un-commoning” the dominant sustainability discourse to include diverse conceptions of human-environment relationships and intergenerational justice.
Building on this appeal, this paper discusses indigenous biocultural diversity conservation in Latin America as alternative ways of relating to the environment and conceptualizing the present generation’s responsibility. Based on a case study conducted with Maya-speaking maize farmers in Mexico, it examines their logics for sustaining the indigenous grains and language, contrasting them with the major principles of “sustainability”.
Contribution short abstract:
By combining the findings from future scenario workshops with ethnographic insights, this paper examines how transport infrastructure sustains and transforms the town of Churchill in northern Manitoba, Canada.
Contribution long abstract:
Churchill, a remote community of 870 people on Hudson Bay in northern Manitoba, Canada, is renowned for its unique transport infrastructure. Inaccessible by road, it features Canada’s only Arctic Ocean deep-water port connected to the North American rail system. A large airport, originally built for military purposes, now supports a thriving tourism industry, earning Churchill the nickname “Polar Bear Capital of the World.” The town’s growth and identity are deeply tied to its transport infrastructure. Recent geopolitical developments, including the war in Ukraine, have spurred substantial federal and provincial investments to modernize the Hudson Bay Railway and the Port of Churchill. For the first time, these critical infrastructures are under local ownership and control, offering both opportunities and challenges. Amid these changes, key questions emerge: How can Churchill achieve sustainability while relying on fragile infrastructures? What are the impacts of climate change and environmental crises on infrastructure, the economy, and everyday life in Churchill? To explore such questions, the ERC project InfraNorth, supported by the Town of Churchill, organized two scenario workshops in 2023. These events brought together residents and transport professionals to discuss and outline ideas for sustainable infrastructure development. By integrating findings from these workshops with ethnographic insights, this paper examines the role of transport infrastructure in sustaining and transforming Churchill. Using an anthropological lens, it critically evaluates the concept of “sustainability,” providing insights into resilience and adaptation in the (Sub)Arctic.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper explores green infrastructure planning initiatives in East Africa that are being promoted as measures for urban sustainability. It critiques the conservativism at the heart of these visions while outlining unexpected potentials for more expansive commoning.
Contribution long abstract:
This paper examines recent green infrastructure intitiatives across East Africa that are being hailed as nature-based strategies for urban sustainability, especially in settings of rapid urban expansion. Measures such green roofs, tree-lined streets or greened traffic islands in many cases blend into cities without substantially challenging the existing road layout or impeding the flow of urban life. Urban green infrastructure, as a rather quick technofix for rapid urbanization and connected problems, promises minor improvements towards sustainable futures but at the same promotes a conservative agenda of liberal capitalist business-as-usual. In some cases well-intended internationally-financed greening measures caused displacement and do little more than greenwash urban development. However, anthropologists can find resources to think green growth more expansively, even at the heart of urban planning, development and policy where increasingly abstract sustainability metrics and indicators are proliferating. My paper distills such forms of thinking from green infrastructure projects and analyzes ways in which they make forms of more-than-human labor visible.
Contribution short abstract:
In post-socialist Serbia, the outbreak of African Swine Fever in 2021 could not be contained, largely owing to clashing perspectives over the appropriate temporalities of sustainability and allocation of responsibility between game managers, veterinarians and the Ministry of Agriculture.
Contribution long abstract:
Since 2007, African Swine Fever (ASF), a deadly epidemic affecting domestic and wild pigs, spread across Eurasia. One (largely ineffective) modality of veterinarization adopted in Poland since 2014 has been driven hunts on wild boar. By 2017 ASF reached the Czech Republic from Poland in a “leap” of several hundred kilometers, and concerted veterinary-state efforts temporarily eradicated it through double-fenced zoning, shooting boar outside the core zone (Broz et al. 2021). Both modalities worked by sacrificing sick and healthy wild boar – and small-holders’ domestic pigs – to protect seemingly “more sustainable” high-finance, high-biosecurity industrial piggeries. When the first outbreak occurred in wild boar in Serbia in the National Park Đerdap (NP) on the Danube in 2021, the local professionals were disunited. The NP’s game manager, a veterinary by training, leaned towards the Czech modality but was not a member of the governing party and overruled. Instead, the representatives of the Ministry of Agriculture saw fencing the area as too expensive and enrolling private veterinaries in intensive monitoring of domestic pigs as inopportune. Instead, the Polish approach was adapted. Despite otherwise favorable conditions – the natural barriers of the Danube to the North and steep mountains to the West – the virus could not be contained and quickly entered the domestic pig herd. Serbian pork production declined by 20 percent. The case study exemplarily shows how veterinary worlds depend on spatio-temporally situated negotiations over which “sustainability” modality to adopt and how to translate it in multispecies relations across scales.