Call for Participation
EnJust Conference 2024 – 21.-23. November 2024 in Hamburg
Environmental Justice in the Age of Planetary Peril:
Concepts, Agencies, Mobilizations

The EnJust Conference 2024 will delve into a key tension of current sustainability and climate politics: the juxtaposition between the perceived urgency for immediate techno-managerial interventions to
combat environmental degradation and climate change, and the increasing proliferation and
mobilization of social movements and their claims for justice. As such, climate policies and
decarbonization efforts, like energy transitions, are predominantly embedded in discourses of
technological solutionism, security, and neoliberal governance that could foster forms of post-fossil
extractivism and green colonialism, thereby exacerbating the marginalization and neglect of justice
concerns. Nevertheless, justice claims are becoming increasingly visible, both politically and
academically, as movements intensify their struggles for socioecological (and technologically just)
transformations and develop new institutional strategies to enable alternative sustainabilities. In line
with this, the conference will critically interrogate the adequacy of environmental justice
conceptualizations in the face of multiple planetary threats, especially pertaining to the worsening
impacts of climate change. In this regard, there are calls for a more comprehensive inclusion of non human agencies and planetary forces in justice conceptualizations and legal frameworks, such as
“planetary justice” or “earth system law”. In addition, postcolonial scholars call for a profound
decolonization of environmental justice, emphasizing the need for greater epistemic and ontological
plurality within respective studies and climate action.

By combining inter- and cross-disciplinary perspectives with creative and experimental approaches,
the conference will explore the extent to which current claims for environmental justice are
compatible with technological approaches needed to combat climate change and environmental
degradation. Moreover, building on discussions at the EnJust Conference 2023 in Chiapas, Mexico, it
will critically examine existing and emerging justice conceptualizations, and asks what approaches are appropriate and necessary to enforce environmental justice in the age of planetary peril. Therefore,
the conference serves as a common space of reflection to discuss emerging concepts, agencies, and mobilizations of environmental justice and invites contributions that address issues such as:

• Attempts to rethink environmental justice, new (or neglected and marginalized) approaches to and perspectives on environmental justice and environmental law
• The emergence and conceptualization of new agencies (e.g. youth movements, non-human agencies) centered around environmental strategies for enforcing justice
• Tensions between climate / environmental justice and an increased securitization of climate change and environmental issues
• Deliberations on meanings and sources of environmental security (e.g. between states, within states, outside of the state system, between actors/groups/ initiatives)
• The consolidation of extractivism and resource depletion through neoliberal policies of debtand austerity
• The influence of (diverse forms of) climate knowledge on policy strategies
• Threats posed to democracy both by massive environmental degradation and rapidtransformation processes
• The deterioration of and need to rethink democracy in the planetary age
• The justice implications of emerging climate technologies such as geoengineering, negative emission technologies or carbon capture and storage
• Convivial and emancipatory technologies
• Environmental conflict (e.g. due to infrastructure-induced displacement) and environmental peacemaking (from below)
• The implementation and legislation of the rights of nature

Besides theoretical and empirical conference papers, we are particularly interested in experimental and creative interventions that aim to bridge art, activism and academia (e.g. activist interventions, artistic performances or exhibitions). Please submit your proposal for contribution (abstract of approx.300 words), indicating either an intervention or conference paper format, by 1 May 2024 to: enjust(at)geographie.uni-kiel.de

The conference is an in-person event, although individual formats such as keynote lectures may be
streamed digitally to enable a wider audience. Active participation therefore requires travel to
Hamburg. If you do not have your own funding, there is the possibility of a travel subsidy by the EnJust network / University of Hamburg. If this is the case and your participation would depend on a subsidy, please indicate this in your submission.

For questions regarding the content of the conference, please contact: Benno Fladvad (benno.fladvad(at)uni-hamburg.de) or Svenja Mc Grath (svenja.mcgrath(at)uni-hamburg.de).

For questions regarding the EnJust network please contact Kim Nierobisch or Clara Lüpke (enjust(at)geographie.uni-kiel.de).

We are very much looking forward to your contributions!

The EnJust 2024 Organizing Committee