Placing: New Engagements with the 'Environment’

Welcome to our conference archive:

The conference on placing was a virtual conference between March 18-20, 2021. It was a tremendous few days of deep scholarly engagement across universities, disciplines, and countries. We, at EnviroLab, could not be more thrilled about how it all went down. Therefore, we want to continue to share as much of it as possible with you all!

Below you will find online snippets that remain from our conference, some presentations (if presenters felt comfortable continuing to share them), the recordings of all the live sessions, Dr. Nikhil Anand’s welcome, and Dr. Michelle Murphy’s keynote presentation. For the security of our conference panelists and discussants, all of the recordings require the password emailed to registrants during the conference. If you didn’t register or if you forgot the magic words, send us an email and we will work with you to get you access to the site.

If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at: pennenvirolab@gmail.com

About the Conference Theme: The concept of ‘place’ has a long history within the social sciences. From thinking about the place of particular cultures to thinking about the socio-economic production of particular environments. Ethnographers have looked at the creation, maintenance and afterlives of places paying attention to the perpetuation of power asymmetries and the normalization of discourses around nature and out-of-placeness. However, our present situation demands that we challenge not just the fixity of previously assumed categories of analysis, but also the very act of ‘placing’ more broadly within our work. By focusing on the act of placing, —as locating, ordering, and rearranging the material and semiotic—we invite ethnographers to think about the challenges and affordances of emergent places.

The conference takes emergent acts of placing as a point of departure for examining the approaches needed to understand, engage with, and effectively respond to the critical environmental challenges of our times. While place has long been central in the theorization of utopian ecological and human communities, human and more-than-human beings are increasingly being dis-placed by cataclysmic economic and environmental change. Historically, claims of place have not just been a mode of constesting displacement (exemplified in the assertion of the right not to be displaced by capitalism), but also one of exclusion (by parochial bodies asserting control over communities in place). As economic, political, and ecological  crises push communities, climates, and beings against previously established boundaries, we are called to reimagine environments and our disciplinary habits of placing.