Session

Scientific research concerning nature–human relationship is a recurrent theme in the last few decades among many disciplines, producing various critical reflections and heated debates. Geographers have emphasized that our understanding of nature as a resource or as a physical phenomenon is excessively narrow, while environmental studies provide a promising interdisciplinary platform for connecting natural and social scientists. How our natural environment is socially constructed and locally perceived? What are the viable strategies for environmental resilience on different interconnected scales (local, regional, global)? How should we critically understand environmental governance in the reproduction of inequalities? This session invites papers dealing with various connecting questions, including the historically changing social constructions and representations of nature, the cultural and political roles of public attitudes towards the natural environment, the moral challenges of environmental conflicts, security and justice, the changing possibilities for environmental activism and grassroots movements, and the sustainable strategies of local cultures to resilience. Critical studies are also invited focusing on the shifting political economies of environmental governance and policy-making, nature-capital relations and the role of the social production of nature in reproducing social inequalities and underdevelopment, the financialization or commodication of nature (e.g. land grabs) under ecological regimes generating environmental crises, and recent controversies in environmental knowledge production (e.g. climate change).