Conference Sessions

This session invited papers applying sociological perspectives to the study of environmental issues, and environmental sociological analyses of societal issues. In the midst of a global social movement cohering around the climate crisis, political and socio-economic debates over extractive industries, and related policy discussions, there exists opportunities for sociologists to contribute to understandings of the environment as a social construct, a political entity, a physical place/space, a component of social structure, and more.

This session invited papers applying sociological perspectives to the study of environmental issues, and environmental sociological analyses of societal issues. In the midst of a global social movement cohering around the climate crisis, political and socio-economic debates over extractive industries, and related policy discussions, there exists opportunities for sociologists to contribute to understandings of the environment as a social construct, a political entity, a physical place/space, a component of social structure, and more.

This session invited papers applying sociological perspectives to the study of environmental issues, and environmental sociological analyses of societal issues. In the midst of a global social movement cohering around the climate crisis, political and socio-economic debates over extractive industries, and related policy discussions, there exists opportunities for sociologists to contribute to understandings of the environment as a social construct, a political entity, a physical place/space, a component of social structure, and more.

The impacts of the biodiversity crisis on human-nonhuman relationships are increasingly being felt. For communities at the forefront of climate change, the loss of plant and animal species and the spread of invasive species are particularly acute. In this context, intersecting environmental and humanitarian crises require bold and ambitious action at a time of increasing uncertainty. As such, there is an urgent need for social science research to analyze the mechanisms precipitating these declines and the collective resources required to realize sustainable and just multi-species futures. This session invited submissions that are situated in or across environmental studies, animal studies, sociology, feminist and queer studies, and Indigenous research. The discussion will further our collective efforts to transcend disciplinary boundaries in the pursuit of hopeful and future-oriented solutions.

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This session is cross-listed with the Environmental Studies Association of Canada.

As the global capitalist system rebrands itself along ‘green’ lines, industry’s destabilizing effects on planetary conditions are becoming increasingly difficult to monitor and ascertain. For one, green modernization efforts have been accompanied by the introduction of countless means of obscuring socio-ecological risks: environmental risk assessments are being paired with NDAs, extractive industries are relocating to regions that are virtually impossible to monitor, and global oil giants are investing in the clean energy technology and infrastructure that were supposed to challenge their place in the global economy. Therefore, as socio-ecological risk becomes an increasingly common topic of political deliberation among groups as diverse as school-age campaigners and Indigenous land defenders, state and corporate interests are finding novel ways of mediating the visibility of risk while making the severity of the planetary crisis unthinkable and the false promises of green modernization unquestionable. To deal with these ‘high risk’ planetary conditions, what is needed is a politics at the center of which is a notion of risk imagined as the crossing of thresholds or tipping points beyond which lies a great unknown of agential and planetary conditions. Such a notion of risk must attend to the immense scale of potential harms immanent to climate change at the same time as it advances a reflexivity in relation to the culturally and technologically embedded processes through which it is visualized and valorized. This panel investigates the social implications and social movements which might arise from this double approach to climatic risk: what kinds of solidarities does it make possible, and how are they forged and sustained affectively, symbolically, and materially?