Call for Papers - National Seminar on Debating Sustainability: Discourses on Environment and Development

Title: Call for Papers - National Seminar on Debating Sustainability: Discourses on Environment and Development

Deadline: 10^th February 2019

About:

Over the past few decades, efforts have been carried out on a wider scale to deconstruct and redefine ‘development’ in the academic and political spheres. This stands in contrast to the pre-1990s where development was popularly perceived as a onetime solution to the human miseries. From a focus on economic growth and an increase in GDP, development today is viewed and understood in terms of an overall sense of well-being. The traditional views of development have often placed it in opposition to nature and ecological sustainability. Clean environment was not something that was ever prioritized in the rush to achieve the targets of development. This anthropocentric view has increasingly come under fire in the wake of a new (still emerging) environmental consciousness, human and animal rights movements, discourses of developmental disparities from within and outside the domains of development studies, and conceptual schemas that question the very concept of development for its capitalist/colonial foundations and the implicit biased treatment of societies. While, on the one hand, the age of globalisation has definitely superseded and surpassed the era of development, as Wolfgang Sachs (1990) has eloquently stated once that, “the age of globalization has produced a transnational class of winners” (vii). This not only signifies a continued age of development with all its economic and cultural redemptions and prepossessions, as the contemporary events again and again testify, it also signifies a demand for new epistemologies and revelations that would re-enhance our engagement with it in this time of hyper globalisation and commodification.

There have also been efforts to strike a balance between the rising human urge to involve in conspicuous consumption and its ecological impacts. Also significant is to see how development is brought back to its basic concerns, namely eradication of poverty and so on. As economists Amartya Sen and Jean Dréze contemplate: “It is important to understand that caring about the environment need not undermine the commitment to development and the removal of poverty and deprivation. In the broader perspective of seeing development in terms of promoting substantive human freedom, fighting poverty and being responsible about the environment cannot but be closely linked”. Nevertheless, we still need to go a long way to understand the chemistry of this fine blend of human needs/ambitions and ecological demands.

The conference is an attempt to map this register as it figures in the contemporary Indian social science landscapes and to project upon their trajectories. It attempts to examine the multiple discourses around this theme today, such as the impact of environmental degradation on the poor, the disproportionate effects of climate change on developing nations and the role of industrialized countries in the battle against global warming. These debates challenge the view that development and environmental protection are fundamentally opposed to each other and enable the formation of a more inclusive idea of sustainability and development.

Empirical and/or conceptual papers that deal with questions of development from a variety of perspectives including, but never restricted to, the following domains are invited.

1. Ecology and Consumption

2. Sustainable Development

3. Human Rights and Development

4. Climate change and development

5. Reimagining development

6. Development and globalization

7. Alternative forms of energy

Abstracts are to be sent to the following email id on or before January 15, 2019. The seminar also involves strong publication plans with international publishers. For selected entries, full papers shall be sent by February 10, 2019.

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