The advent of the Anthropocene concept and Earth system sciences – putting forward upscaled temporalities in the public sphere, the dramatization of warnings on planetary limits and boundaries and on the human impacts of climate change – provide a challenging context for the humanities and social sciences. Cropping up these developments and at the crossroad of world and connected histories, environmental history, human geography and social, political and legal studies, the conference will examine how ideas of a global, unified and limited earth played a role in human reflexivity, and how the “right use” of the Earth as a whole has become, and is increasingly becoming, an object of knowledge making and government practices.

Argument

The acknowledgement of the Anthropocene as a new epoch after the Holocene in the geological history of the Earth provides a fruitful platform to think together Earth processes, life history and societies’ dynamics into a comprehensive framework. If humans act as a telluric force altering the geology of the earth and if the alteration of the earth system out of the Holocene transforms geopolitics and how we act, feel and think, then, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, the understanding of geological history and the understanding of human history cannot be kept separated.

The advent of the Anthropocene concept and Earth system sciences – putting forward upscaled temporalities in the public sphere, the dramatization of warnings on planetary limits and boundaries and on the human impacts of climate change – provide a challenging context for the humanities and social sciences. In history, the Anthropocene has led to news converging grounds between world history and environmental history. In social and political sciences, it has led to new researches on the socio-historical construction of the global environment, the role of knowledge networks, numbers and images as well as on the power/knowledge deployed to govern the Earth as a system and to govern (through) limits. In anthropology, it has stimulated an ontological turn, fertile multispecies ethnographies and cosmopolitics. In human geography, it has stimulated new works on the politics of scale and the processes of “planetarization”. In the field of legal studies, the Anthropocene theme, as well as planetary boundaries concept, have recently stimulated the reformulation of foundational legal concepts and the conceptualization of new legal process at the crossroads of national and international levels.

Already confirmed plenary keynote speakers include: Anna Tsing (Aarhus University Research on The Anthropocene), Katherine Richardson (University of Copenhagen), Erik Swyngedouw (University of Manchester), Jorge Viñuales (University of Cambridge), Alain Supiot (Collège de France) et Mireille Delmas-Marty (Collège de France).

Thèmes

The  conference will be  organized around 4 main themes:

• A History of ‘Geopower’: from the 15th to the 21st Century
• "Governing a Limited Earth / Governing by Limits
• Only one Earth? The Politics of Scale in the Construction of the « global » environment
• ‘Planetarization' of Law? Legal Concepts and Normative Process

Submitting Proposals

The Organizing Committee welcomes abstracts from academics as well as practitioners, including staff of adjudicatory institutions and international organizations. Beyond papers addressing one of these four main conference themes, transversal papers are also welcome.

Proposals should be sent trought the website of the conference: https://rightuseofearth.sciencesconf.org/ or by email to christophe.bonneuil@cnrs.fr and include an abstract (about 300 words + bibliography + a short author’s biography, including the author’s contact details and main publications).

The submission deadline is December, 20, 2017

Papers acceptation will be announced to submitters before January, 25, 2018.

Scientific Committee

• Christophe Bonneuil (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, PSL)
• Luca d’Ambrosio (Collège de France, PSL)
• Magali Reghezza (Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL)
• Stefan C. Aykut (Hamburg University)
• Peder Anker (New York University)