CFP: Relating to Nature: Alternative Approaches and Solutions to the Transgression of Planetary Boundaries - Workshop at the MANCEPT 2017 workshops

This workshop focuses on the human-nature relationship. More specifically, the focus lies on alternative approaches towards or perspectives on this relationship in the light of the ecological crisis and how these can lead to alternative solutions.

The workshop is envisages as an opportunity for participants to think together and generate new questions/ solutions, and has a two-fold aim. Firstly, the idea is to bring theorists from different angles in environmental philosophy/ environmental political theory in conversation with one another. The purpose of this assembly would be to create a platform for discussion of the essence of the human-nature relationship to challenge both anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric worldviews.

The second objective is offer a space for discussion outside of the mainstream environmental political theory discourses that focus heavily on climate change as the main problem facing lifeforms/humanity today (e.g. debates on climate justice) or environmental human rights.

Under this heading presentations could focus on (but do not have to be limited to) any of the following topics:

• Justice and nature: expanding the moral circle, widening and recasting  the meaning of justice
• Challenging worldviews: visions that reject consumerist attitudes/individualistic perspectives towards nature calling into question humanity’s argued place as the Earth’s steward, engineer or manager
• Green virtue ethics: an alternative to mainstream deontological and consequential understandings of humanity’s moral relationship with nature
• Alternative ‘imaginaries’: other approaches to describing humanity’s relationship with nonhuman nature
• Specific environmental issues: addressing very pressing, but less widely understood environmental problems such as biodiversity loss or the changes in the biogeochemical cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus

For more information see here: