Call for Papers: The Politics of Building a Climate Crisis. Cornell University, 24-25 April 2020
The History of Architecture and Urbanism Society invites graduate students to participate in its annual research symposium.
Organized by graduate students enrolled in the History of Architecture and Urban Development program, “The Politics of Building a Climate Crisis” will seek to rethink architecture’s historic role in the politics of climate change while reimagining interdisciplinary paths for addressing it. Though rarely acknowledged, the existential crisis posed by climate change also rests on the normative boundaries and historiographic conventions within and between fields of scholarship — the intrinsic knowledge supports of societies based on fossil capital. To critically address climate change, in other words, requires addressing the nature and politics of building our own fields of scholarship. To this end, we invite graduate students from any discipline and at any stage of development to submit abstracts for presentation on this particular dimension of the climate crisis.
As part of this reflexive historicization, the symposium aims to broadly rethink and reassess conceptions of ‘environment’ and ‘climate,’ such as: the reification of nature as an aspect of modernity; post- and de-colonial perspectives, especially as they relate to recent discussions about Western mitigation strategies (i.e. The Green New Deal); the climate crisis as a continuation of empire and colonialism; questions of technology, extraction, regulation, infrastructure, and territory; inflections of the capital-state power nexus; the role of ‘expertise’ in shaping building practices aimed at taming and manipulating ‘climates;’ the construction and normalization of ‘crisis’ as a new political ground through corporate activism and social and grassroots movements; or the development of new media and other contested public spheres wherein the climate crisis is built and played out.
Please submit your paper title and abstract (250-300 words) with your name and affiliation through this link by 6 March 2020. Authors of accepted papers will be notified by 10 March 2020 via email, and will be asked to submit a full draft (3,000-3,200 words) by 20 April 2020.
Questions can be direct to Ana Ozaki at ago32@cornell.edu