Short Abstract

In times of multiple crises, this workshop moves with struggles for democratic and environmental futures, asking what "environmental democracies" could mean, and considering both the marginalization of environmental concerns and hopeful reimaginings.

Long Abstract

What moves us, ecologically, in a time of multiple crises? This workshop, organized by DGSKA’s AG Umweltethnologie, recenters fragile materialities, uncontested politics, and connects struggles for environmental futures with struggles for democratic futures.

The accelerating ecological crisis dominates public attention through reports about extreme weather events such as persistent heat waves, fires, floods, droughts, or storms. While this might seem to lend urgency to action, environmental concerns are paradoxically being sidelined: squeezed out of substantive political engagement, even as they are intensively appropriated for exclusionary, identitarian ends.

Anthropological work illuminates exactly these dynamics of urgency moving and pressuring while being moved aside at the same time. In this workshop, we want to move (with) ethnographic inquiries into environmental and democratic struggles and explore what ‘environmental democracies’ could mean.

We want to focus on examples of displacement and marginalization of core environmental matters, but also on hopeful examples such as building alternative communities, sustaining ethical commitments, and imagining different futures. Thus, we invite contributions that tackle moving and re-moving environmental issues in political sites and arenas. On the one hand, we welcome inspiring examples of how cities are rethought amid heat waves, ‘nature’ enters legal spheres, more-than-human habitability is center-staged, and water and soil management is collectively reimagined. On the other hand, we also invite cases highlighting neglect or destruction, such as practices of de- or reforestation, funding criteria, the politics of mobility, or (green) construction & development.