Note: We are open to making this a hybrid session, if interested participants reach out to us inquiring about this. 

Recent scholarship on the climate crisis highlights adaptation as one strategic response, meaning the development and implementation of technologies and political solutions necessary to live with the effects of climate change and reduce the vulnerability of human and environmental systems to climate impacts. Autopoiesis, meaning “self-creation,” is a term first elaborated in the biological sciences to describe dynamic ecologies of self-generating, recursive relationships between and within living entities. Rather than a set of static components, an autopoietic system is a living system that continually creates the conditions for its own reproduction and growth. Scholars in the social sciences and humanities use this concept to understand the complexities of self-sustaining social institutions such as colonialism, race, and religion. Autopoiesis can also deepen our understanding of how organizing efforts develop and sustain adaptive strategies to compounding climate and economic crises, using tools already available in their cultural and social environments. Community organizing and grassroots movements are promising settings to explore questions related to both climate adaptation and social reproduction: What work is necessary to continuously confront and unlearn psychologies of domination and hierarchy? How are collective values, commitments, and humanizing ontologies nurtured by those working towards environmental and climate justice? 

In the spirit of Ruha Benjamin’s call to “imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within,” this session centers the imaginative autopoietic efforts occurring within communities, movements, and institutions to advance environmental and climate justice. Potential topics may include though are not limited to: the role of certain social institutions and communities in climate justice movements, religious and philosophical contributions to theories of autopoiesis, and varying scales of social transformation (i.e., individual, community, institutional). We welcome a variety of thought across multiple geographies, temporal scales, and theoretical and empirical perspectives.

Organizers: Shayda Azamian, Madeleine Lewis, & George Schmidt 

Please submit abstracts to Shayda Azamian at shayda.azamian@vanderbilt.edu by 15 December 2023. 

Modality: In-person, open to hybrid