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Call for paper presentations for a Planning & Environment Research Group Sponsored Panel Session at the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers Annual International Conference 2013 (London, August 28-30).
In recent years, new struggles for political-ecological rights across cities in the global south are radically transforming notions of citizenship in these societies. The recent coming of an ‘urban age’ and the focus of many countries in the global south on cities as engines of development and growth, has spurred a range of grassroots struggles in these places that are working to redefine rights and justice through a notion of ‘ecological citizenship’ (Dobson 2003, Valencia-Saiz 2005). These events challenge decades of ecological and eco-feminist scholarship that sought to portray women and marginalised groups as victims of neoliberal development. Moving beyond earlier state-citizen binaries, this session aims to use ecological citizenship as a conceptual device to understand the new ways that rights, justice and democracy within grassroots struggles are being reimagined through human-nature interactions. It examines new conceptualisations of citizenship beyond deliberative democracy in the public sphere to simultaneously consider the political agencies of actors within private spheres. Aiming to develop the largely unexplored notion of ecological citizenship in the global south, this session is particularly interested in papers that seek to develop gendered and subjective perspectives of citizen-ecology relations through which rights, justice and democracy are being debated, contested and reconfigured during rapid urbanisation in much of the global south.
Topics in this theme could include but are not limited to:
• Instrumental dimensions of ecological citizenships in contesting neoliberal urban development
• Relationships between citizenship struggles for environmental rights in the urban realm and political agency in private realms
• Critical and active citizenships in shaping sustainable urban development
• Building capacity and freedom of choice in participatory urban development
• Social learning and transformative change through critical practices of ecological citizenship
• Citizenship rights to environmental justice and sustainable urban development
• Citizenship rights to deliberative urban planning
• Citizenship rights to procedural justice and rule of law in challenging urban development
Please send in your abstracts to Ayona Datta a.datta@leeds.ac.uk by 1st February 2013
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