Events by Enviroant
Future events
Workshop announcement and call for participants
Energy Anthropology Network – Environment and Anthropology Network – Humans and Other Living Beings
19-21 May, 2025 — Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy
How are humans and other living or nonliving beings, from frontline or vulnerable communities, experts and nation states to endangered and invasive species or extinct glaciers responding to the multifaceted environmental and ecological calamities facing our planet? How are these communities organizing the possibilities of survival, transformation, resistance, or flourishing? This workshop, organized by three EASA networks – Energy Anthropology, Humans and Other Living Beings, and EnviroAnt – invites proposals that explore the interconnectedness of energy systems and infrastructures, human and nonhuman agencies, and environmental dynamics. We invite contributions that engage with the entanglements of infrastructures, the metabolic flows they shape, and their impacts on both human and nonhuman lifeways in the context of the Anthropocene.
In addition to creative formats, the workshop will feature field visits offering a grounded exploration of Venice’s intricate energy flows and ecological dynamics. We will travel to places such as the barene, an endangered ecological system vital for protecting Venice from tides, and the MOSE, a system of mobile barriers designed to manage flooding in the city. These visits will examine the entanglements of power dynamics, non-human adaptations, and their long-term impacts on the lagoon’s metabolic balance. We also have an exciting list of confirmed participants: Anthropologists Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer (Rice University), whose work includes the design of the world’s first glacier memorial, will join the workshop to contribute their insights. Jamie Cross (University of Glasgow) will also join the workshop and lead a field session on humidity and mold in Venice.
While traditional papers are most welcome, we especially encourage proposals for sessions and activities that embrace experimentation and reflect the interconnected themes of the workshop. Below is a list of possible formats to inspire your proposals:
- Roundtables: suggest a topic for a roundtable discussion featuring 2-5 speakers.
- Visual or Multimedia Presentations: photo essays, videos, digital exhibits showcasing research and reflections on material flows, energy, or metabolic processes.
- Performances: Live or recorded performances that engage with the themes of energy, infrastructures, metabolisms, multispecies relations. This could be dance, spoken word, soundscapes.
- Storytelling: fictional narratives, ethnographic storytelling, poetry.
- Flash presentations: 5-min 5-slides presentation to share flash insights, provocations, questions and spark discussion on a theme related to metabolisms.
- Ideation Labs: propose a lab for a small number of participants to collaborate and tackle a practical challenge related to energy, climate change, and/or infrastructure.
- Teaching Pods: share insights, questions, challenges, and ideas about teaching related to energy, environmental, and multispecies anthropology.
- Works in progress: submit your works in progress for constructive feedback. This could include a book chapter, dissertation chapter, article draft, or anything else that would benefit from supportive peer feedback outside of traditional journal reviews.
- Sustainability Practices: share ideas, practices, solutions for cultivating wellbeing and sustainability at individual, household, and/or community scales.
- Research Presentations: Of course more ‘traditional’ papers are welcome, this could be a 15-min paper or an excerpt of a longer paper.
- Place-Based Activities: Exploring features of Venice’s urban and aquatic environment, such as silence, flooding, malleable spaces, and the potential to occupy public space creatively.
This is not an exhaustive list: Please feel free to suggest other activities or contributions.
For all of these, please provide a 250-word abstract/summary of your proposed contribution, including title, name of author(s)/performers/facilitators, institutional affiliation, and email address. Please also include any technical equipment or materials that you would need for your proposed contribution.
Limited funds will be available to support the attendance of early career researchers and scholars from the Global South. A portion of the funds are set aside for supporting sustainable travel choices.
Please send all contributions to enviroant.network(at)gmail.com by Friday the 21st of February.
Successful applicants will be notified by the end of February.
Feel free to reach out to any of the networks with questions.
Organizing committee
Valentina Bonifacio, Umberto Cao, Cormac Cleary, Pauline Destree, Raghnild Freng Dale, Zeynep Oguz, Elena Stecca, Amelia Veitch.
Past events
Network meeting
September 2024, Online
Hope, Ruination and Environmentalism
Environmental Anthropology 2021
14-15 October 2021, School of Humanities, Tallinn University, Estonia
We are pleased to announce the second biannual meeting of the EnviroAnt Network for Environment & Anthropology.
Thematically, this conference will focus on the interplay between hope and ruination at play in the politics of making and remaking landscapes. Environmental Anthropology has long been concerned with landscapes as more-than-human, contested spaces, and as temporal markers that materialise people’s ideals and fears. Environmental degradation has been a key concern to environmentalists, but equally to environmental anthropologists and scholars in related disciplines alike. Taking contested landscapes/terrains as its starting point and material anchor, this conference invites efforts to tell the stories and lamentations of environmental destruction. At the same time, we invite participants to attend to the hopes, aspirations but also mythologies that, too, materialise in urban, industrial, and rural landscapes. What place is there for optimism in environmental anthropology?
In line with the thematic focus described above, the conference will facilitate discussion and exchange between environmental anthropologists (inviting also scholars and practitioners in related disciplines) on the question how environmental anthropology might intervene in contested landscapes/terrains.
To view the programme online:
PROGRAMME
Further conference information can also be found here:
EVENT INFORMATION
Enviroant network panels at the 16th EASA Biennial Conference "New anthropological horizons in and beyond Europe" 21-24 July 2020 in Lisbon
P019 Privileged fear: Europe and the concern for environmental catastrophes
Convenors: Aet Annist (University of Tartu), Nina Moeller (Coventry University)
Discussant: Thomas Hylland Eriksen (University of Oslo)
P162 Wet horizons: hydrosocial re-articulations in the Anthropocene
Convenors: Franz Krause (University of Cologne), Sandro Simon (University of Cologne), Nora Horisberger (University of Cologne), Werner Krauß (University of Bremen), Benoit Ivars (University of Cologne)
Perspectives and stories in a world of facts and figures?
Exploring the potential of anthropology in tackling environmental issues
EASA’s Environment and Anthropology Network inaugural meeting
12-13 December 2019, Cologne, Germany
Read a report from this workshop
This workshop provided the opportunity to get to know each other’s work, develop the purposes and strategies of the network, and plan possible collaborations.
As we are convinced that environmental anthropology can contribute to alternative and more just futures, we place the exploration of possible ways to do so at the heart of our first meeting. We aim to explore the potential for anthropologists, and anthropological insights, in contributing to public debates and solution attempts for current environmental issues. We will share diverse experiences of linking up with policy and practice. We will exchange some of the methods that have proved useful to this end. And we will critically discuss the potential benefits and harms that providing our knowledge in these circles may cause.
Read more about the workshop here