Ecologies of Labour, Symposium and Workshop

This event addresses the urgent crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and the wider problematic of human-environment relations, by focusing on labour – defined as those behaviours, some waged and some unwaged, by which humans interact with their environment to meet their needs. Despite extensive evidence that human activities have produced an ecological and environmental crisis, and the central role of labour within human-environment interactions, responses to this crisis by western academia and policy-makers have largely been limited to consumption and, within production, to outputs, processes and materials. The diverse sources of knowledge on this topic, the inherently international character of both the ecological crisis and labour relations, and the challenges involved in translating and mainstreaming insights gleaned from diverse international sources calls for an international dialogue to which this event seeks to contribute.

Critical social theorists have linked the negative impact of contemporary human societies on nature with relations of domination, between individuals and groups and between humans and other parts of nature, accompanied by a high degree of alienation of humans from themselves, from one another, and from their environment. Many examples exist of more connected forms of labour, which express an underlying principle of humans moving with other parts of nature in a mutually nourishing way, or what some call ecological labour, as a more sustainable, even regenerative, alternative to the principle of domination. For example, ecological labour is prevalent in many indigenous knowledges and practices, and in the permaculture movement. Yet, such approaches are highly diverse, poorly understood within mainstream western society, rarely enter into discussions about how to respond to the environmental crisis in the UK, and in many cases are being placed under serious threat by the combined forces of globalisation and climate change, and as a result are adapting and developing new forms of resilience. In many cases, ecological labour takes a hybrid form in which multiple cultural traditions combine in unexpected ways. Part of the strength of these approaches lies in their depth of knowledge about the ecology of particular places, and their culturally embedded processes of knowledge transmission and adaptation across generations. Bringing insights from such approaches therefore calls for a demanding process of translation – in multiple senses – and an openness to hybridity.

The first day of this event will showcase existing work within this community through presentations of papers, as a basis for deepening connections between the work of different colleagues, while the second day will deliver a workshop to produce new proposals for collaborative work. The event will be accompanied by cultural activities.

The symposium and workshop will take place at Nottingham Trent University in the city of Nottingham, England. We strongly encourage all participants who can do so to attend in person because we believe this will make for a much richer discussion and afford many more vital opportunities for informal discussion around the formal sessions. However, we also recognise the many and varied barriers that might prevent this, and so we are running.

For any enquiries, contact tom.vickers@ntu.ac.uk