Short Abstract

This panel examines how African languages, indigenous knowledge, and cultural practices shape understandings of environmental change. It explores local ecological discourses, environmental justice, and community resilience, foregrounding African perspectives on sustainability and climate adaptation.

Long Abstract

Environmental crises in Africa have been extensively interpreted through global climate narratives that often overlook indigenous ecological knowledge, local communicative practices, and culturally grounded understandings of environmental change. This panel brings together interdisciplinary scholarship that explores how African languages, discourses, oral traditions, and everyday communicative practices capture ecological realities through distinct African perspectives. It examines how communities negotiate, reinterpret, contest, and localise dominant environmental and climate discourses while sustaining indigenous ecological philosophies embedded in proverbs, sayings, narratives, rituals, and other cultural practices.

The panel welcomes contributions that investigate relationships between language and ecology, local ecological realities and dominant international environmental discourses across different African contexts. Topics may include discourses and representations of environmental crises: pollution, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, climate change and related adaptations, and resource shortages. Additionally, from an ecolinguistic perspective, attention will be paid to indigenous ecological wisdom encoded in oral traditions, linguistic expressions of environmental justice and the role of discourse in shaping ecological identities, environmental governance, and community resilience. Studies that foreground African-centred epistemologies, demonstrating how communities generate locally grounded environmental imaginaries that challenge externally imposed knowledge frameworks, are particularly encouraged

Our goal is to bring disciplines like linguistics, anthropology, geography, environmental humanities, African studies, political ecology, sociology, and development studies into conversation in order to illuminate the complex intersections of language, culture, ecology, and power on issues related to the protection of, and adaptation to, environmental changes. Through this, we contribute to a more inclusive, locally grounded, and socially just understanding of Africa's environmental challenges.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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