EXTENDED DEADLINE: 14 June 2023
CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS include
Uppsala University, 11.1.-13.1.2024
A conference organized by the Political Ecologies of the Far Right (PEFR) network, the Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism-project at the division of STS at Chalmers University of Technology, the White Skin, Black Fuel-project at the Department of Human Geography at Uppsala University, and CEMFOR at Uppsala University.
Far-right political parties, ideologies and movements are increasingly exercising influence across the world. At the same time, climate change and environmental degradation are intensifying in their urgency. What happens when the two phenomena meet? How, when and why do they intersect? How are party and non-party sectors of the far right mobilizing ecological issues and discourses to their advantage, whether through championing or rejecting environmentalist claims? What are the ecological underpinnings of far-right politics today?
Following the 2019 PEFR conference and in light of the persistent relevance of the above questions, the PEFR network – founded to foster information sharing and act as an access and contact point to anyone interested in the phenomenon -, invites everyone interested to the second interdisciplinary conference on the political ecologies of the far right, PEFR 2024.
More specifically, recent years have provided plenty of examples of the contemporary far right engaging in (anti-)environmentalism, from opposition to climate policies to the promotion of their own ‘ecological’ ones. This stance resonates with a conspiratorial suspicion of the state, science, elites, globalism, and supposed processes of moral, cultural and social decay. How can we understand the causes, motivations and consequences of far-right rejection of environmentalism and environmental concerns? What broader ideologies, interests, psychologies, histories, narratives and perceptions does it reflect? What might the implications be for ecological futures if far-right parties continue to amass power? How can various groups fighting for socio-environmental and climate justice converge and collaborate?
However, there is also a legacy of genealogical connections between environmental concern and far-right thought, including links between conservation and eugenics in the early national parks movement in the US and dark green currents within Nazism. Hostility to immigration informed by Malthusian thinking and regressive forms of patriotic localism have often surfaced in Western environmentalism too. That is, how do such ways of conceiving the human and non-human, and the relations between the two through ideologies of Nature persist in the mainstream environmental movement today? What frames, linkages and concerns are central to eco-right narratives? How can environmental thinking ward off the specter of green nationalism and ecofascism?
How to apply:
The conference aims to bring together not only scholars studying the far right and political ecology but also a wide range of activists and practitioners from various sectors of society. Against this background, this conference aims to provide a space for collaboration, mutual learning, and networking.
We welcome contributions from activists and scholars from all disciplines, and look forward to receiving submissions for individual papers, panels and workshops. In particular, we welcome submissions which share and develop ideas via mixed, academic-activist events.
To make the conference accessible, the base-fee for the three days is 300SEK. However, those who have sufficient financial support from their organizations are expected to pay a 1500SEK fee.
Presentations via video link will be possible.
Submission of abstracts: Please send abstracts (max. 300 words) as an attached file to pefr24@protonmail.com by 14th June 2023. Please include your full name, position and affiliation. Applicants will be notified of the outcome of the review process by the end of August. Registration will be open in September.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- climate obstruction/climate change, fossil fuels and the far right
- anti-environmentalism of far right
- linking environmental, anti-fascist, anti-racist activism and social movements
- overlaps between the far right and the mainstream/ left-wing in the environmental domain
- ‘cultural Marxism’, conspiracy theories and the environment
- gender, sexuality, the far right and environment (eco, hegemonic or industrial masculinities, anti-feminism, normative heterosexuality, patriarchy)
- renewable energy, vegan/vegetarianism, animal rights, agriculture, toxic waste, land use change, biodiversity extinction, pollution etc and the far right
- environmental science, epistemology and the far right
- racism, xenophobia, nature, conservation, ecology, wilderness and far right
- whiteness as/and ‘endangered’ species
- scenarios of a far-right ecological future
- religion, ecology and the far right
- populism, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, alt-right, far right
- greenwashing, industry links, capital and funding for the far right and links with environmental issues
- far right narratives on development, progress, and futures and their ecological conceptualization
- environmental history of green ideas in far-right politics
- dark green histories and genealogies of environmentalism
- infiltrations/ alliances between the contemporary far right and environmentalists
- ecofascism, bio-nazism, green nationalism
- psychologies, affects, emotions, private lives of the ecologies of the far right
- historical legacies of ecologically unequal exchange and racial capitalism
- anti-racist and anti-fascist strategies and mobilization in environmental and climate movements and reverse