Short Abstract

How do environments under threat move us? This workshop examines environments that have become emblematic of ecological decline—forests, glaciers, peatlands, rivers, and coastlines—as sites where affects gather, livelihoods and politics are remade, and contested futures take shape.

Long Abstract

Forests, glaciers, peatlands, rivers, coastlines: certain environments have become emblematic of ecological decline and planetary crisis. As material transformations become visible and tangible in particular landscapes, these environments come to embody broader concerns about environmental futures. Circulating through science, media, policy, and daily life, they carry dense affective loads—grief, anxiety, nostalgia, hope—and anchor public narratives of collapse and renewal. Yet for people who live with and within them, they are material conditions of lifemaking, terrains of extraction, conservation, and dispossession, and sites where competing visions of the future are made legible.

This workshop asks: how do environments under threat move us, and what do they set in motion? Materially, they shape possibilities and constraints of life: livelihoods reorganized, lands enclosed, resources extracted, bodies exposed. Affectively, they orient people toward some responses and away from others, becoming emotionally charged presences in public consciousness and intimate life alike. Politically, they become arenas in which competing ways of valuing, using, protecting, or transforming environments are negotiated and contested.

At the intersection of these dynamics, these environments become particularly contested sites of future-making. Different visions of desirable, possible, and feared futures take shape around them, while practices of extraction, conservation, restoration, adaptation, or resistance actively work to bring particular futures into being.

We invite ethnographically grounded papers exploring how environments under threat become affectively charged, politically contested, and material sites of future-making, and how people living through environmental change negotiate competing possibilities for what these environments—and lives within them—might become.