Environmental Studies Association of Canada – l'Association canadienne d'études environnementales

SPACE AND FLOWS: AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON URBAN AND EXTRAURBAN STUDIES
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, USA
4-5 December 2010
http://www.spacesandflows.com/conference-2010/

This conference aims to critically engage contemporary spatial, social, ideological, and political transformations in a transitional world. In a process-oriented world of movement, the global north and global south now simultaneously converge and diverge in a dialectic that shapes and transforms cities, suburbs , and rural areas. This conference addresses the nature and mapping of these forces and the dynamics that propel these changes. The conference also examines and defines the myriad of different spaces that make up our contemporary world, including urban, edgeurban, de-urban, micro-urban, greenfield, and off-the-grid.

In addition to plenary presentations, the Spaces and Flows Conference includes parallel presentations by practitioners, teachers, and researchers. We invite you to respond to the conference Call-for-Papers. Presenters may submit their written papers for publication in the peer reviewed ‘Spaces and Flows: An International Journal on Urban and Extraurban Studies’. If you are unable to attend the conference in person virtual registrations are also available which allow you to submit a paper for referring and possible publication. You also have the ability to upload your presentation to the Space and Flows YouTube channel.

The deadline for the next round in the call for papers (a title and short abstract) is 13 May 2010. Future deadlines will be announced on the conference website after this date. Proposals are reviewed within two weeks of submission. Full details of the conference, including an online proposal submission form, may be found at the conference website: http://www.spacesandflows.com/conference-2010/ .

Continue Reading

Theme: Sustainability in a Changing World
Location: Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec
May 31 – June 1, 2010

We invite you to participate in the 2010 ESAC conference. It’s part of the 2010 Congress for the broad range of bodies that fall under the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

People from community groups, NGOs, practitioners, policy makers, (and of course the drivers of the conference: academics and students) are welcome to attend and actively participate. If you are interested in issues that involve climate change, food security, natural resources, millennium development goals, environmental health, environmental literacy and journalism tips that encompass all of the above, then this conference is for you.

View the Full Schedule.

In the spirit of passion for the planet and networking with your environment community, please join us at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec – May 31 to June 1, 2010

Cost of Attendance:
Member: $60
Non-Member: $90
Retired Member: $40
Retired Non-Member: $50
Student/Unwaged Member: $30
Student/Unwaged Non-Member: $40
Banquet: $35

Click here to complete your registration.

When registering for Congress 2010, one of the drop-down options will be to attend our banquet at the Spanish Club, scheduled for the evening of June 1st, that includes tapas and the choice of paella, lamb or a vegetarian option with a band and late night party with Canadian Association of Studies in International Development (CASID) for a cost of $35. This is an excellent opportunity for you to network and/or socialize with student and faculty colleagues.

Any questions please contact:
Dr. Shirley Thompson,
Natural Resources Institute, University of Manitoba,
70 Dysart Rd.,
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2
phone: (204) 474-7170 fax: 204-261-0038
e-mail: s_thompson@umanitoba.ca
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~thompso4/

ESAC ACEE call for proposals

ESAC ACEE 2010 Paper Proposal Form

ESAC-ACEE-2010-Panel-proposal-form

Accommodation Information

Informational Poster Contest

Travel Grant Application

Continue Reading

CALL FOR PAPERS (deadline extended to March 31, 2010)

“The Good Life—Imagining Alternative Futures”
“Men form states to secure a bare subsistence, but the ultimate
object of the state is the good life.”  – Aristotle, Politics

Historians and other chroniclers of the past have depicted the
twentieth century in a variety of terms. Some refer to it as the
‘age of extremes’, others as the ‘age of anxiety’, and still others
as ‘the age of science’ or the age of ‘analysis’; but none have been
foolish enough to call it the ‘age of the good life’ and compose
eclogues in praise of it, and for very good reasons that need not be
rehearsed here. There is growing public awareness, though it’s far
from reaching any consensus on specific solutions, that the
institutional structures of the present are not providing “the good
life” for too many people. And the global ecological crisis is
compelling evidence that the Enlightenment project of the
“perfection of humanity” has utterly failed to produce even a shadow
image of the “good life”.

This conference is a forum to discuss competing but ecologically
grounded conceptions of “the good life.” We are calling for panels,
papers, and posters from those who find value in collaboration and
view the biophysical world as a unifying element in that
collaboration. Preference will be given to contributions that
represent interdisciplinary approaches to defining “the good life”
in environmental terms from the widest range of disciplines,
including environmental studies, philosophy, theology, history,
geography, anthropology, sociology, political science, economics,
psychology, cultural studies, urban studies, women’s studies,
ecofeminism, eco-socialism, etc.

Email registration form and your abstract as MS Word attachment to
Dr. Robert Chapman, Department of Philosophy & Environmental Studies
and Dr. Judith Pajo, Department of Anthropology & Sociology (piers@pace.edu).
The deadline for submission has been extended to March 31, 2010.
Abstracts will be reviewed anonymously; please omit personal
information from the abstract. Notices will be sent mid-April, 2010.

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS

John Cronin
Director and Chief Executive Officer, Beacon Institute for Rivers
and Estuaries
Senior Fellow for Environmental Affairs, Pace Academy for Applied
Environmental Studies, Pace University

Andrew Revkin, M.A. Columbia
Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding, Pace Academy for
Applied Environmental Studies, Pace University
New York Times Reporter on the Environment for 15 years before
joining Pace University

Rik Scarce, Ph.D. Washington State University
Associate Professor of Sociology, Skidmore College
Author of Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental
Movement (Left Coast Press, 2006).

DORM ROOMS

Pace University is making dorm rooms available for our conference
participants in Maria’s Tower, June 2-6, 2010.

The cost for housing is $60/night for a single room and $48/night
per person for a double room. (You may select your roommate or we
will assign you a same gender person with whom you will share a
bath.) There is a minimum of two nights stay. Linens will be
provided. Free wireless internet access is available but must be
reserved in advance.

To reserve a dorm room, email your request, specifying type of room,
dates of arrival and departure, and optional internet access to piers@pace.edu. Please mail payment to PIERS Office, 41 Park Row, 7th floor, New
York, NY 10038.
The deadline for reserving a dorm room is April 30, 2010.
Cancellations cannot be honored after that date.

TICKETED DINNER
The cost for the dinner is $50. To get a ticket, please email your
request, specifying your preference for fish, chicken, or a
vegetarian dinner, to piers@pace.edu. Please mail payment to PIERS  Office, 41 Park Row, 7th floor, New York, NY 10038.

CONFERENCE WEBSITE

To register for the conference, please visit the PIERS 2010
conference website at http://www.pace.edu/pace/dyson/research-and-resource-centers/academic-centers-and-institutes/piers/summer-2010-conference/

CONTACT US

PIERS Office
Institute for Environmental and Regional Studies
41 Park Row, 7th floor
New York, NY 10038
piers@pace.edu
www.pace.edu/piers

Continue Reading

In this, the International Year of Biodiversity, the 2010 RCEN Annual General Assembly is focusing on biodiversity across Canada and our planet. The RCEN’s 2010 Annual General Assembly and Conference will be held in Montreal, from September 17th-19th.

Biological diversity – or biodiversity – is the term given to the variety of life on Earth and the natural patterns it forms. It is this combination of life forms and their interactions with each other and with the rest of the environment that has made Earth a uniquely habitable place for humans.

Yet over the last 50 years, humans have had more impact on ecosystems than at any other time in history. Loss of both species and ecosystem diversity has occurred as a result of habitat loss and alteration, over-exploitation, climate change, and the spread of invasive species into pristine environments. The current rate of species extinction is 1,000 times greater than the normal background rate that has existed since life evolved on Earth.

This is more than an academic issue. We are now starting to understand what the consequences of this loss might be. Biodiversity is crucial to the survival of humankind—indeed, of all life on Earth. It supports us with free ecological goods — such as food (including fish, seafood, game, wild foods, spices, crops), water, medicines, lumber and fuels, and free ecological services — such as air and water purification, decomposition of waste, pollination of crops, seed dispersal, pest and disease control, climate and flood regulation, ecotourism, and cultural, educational and spiritual inspiration.

For example, healthy biodiversity provides us with the continued existence of bees to pollinate food crops, or maintains the health of a marsh ecosystem to absorb flood waters and filter out pollution so fish and other organisms continue to survive. Biodiversity also creates and supports human cultures and our spiritual needs. Imagine, for instance, how First Nations cultures on the Pacific coast would have evolved without salmon, the principal iconic species. Our cultures—our values—are a direct result of our environment.

What are the costs of losing these free ecological goods and services — to life, to our cultures and to our economic systems? How can the concept of ecological goods and services help create solutions that will slow down the current rate of biodiversity loss? Can putting a price on ecosystem services protect and restore biodiversity?

Speakers with local, regional, provincial, national, and international perspectives will explore these questions, present examples of successful interventions that have led to the survival of species and habitats and will discuss the priority areas where practices, policies, strategies, and programs must be developed.

This conference will provide specific opportunities for attendees and speakers to engage and exchange on their experiences and challenges and help enhance the informal networks on this important topic.

Information taken from the RCEN website.

Continue Reading

The McGill Institute for the Study of Canada is pleased to announce that registration for the Canadian Water: Towards a New Strategy conference is now open. Focusing on issues related to Canadian water policies, the conference will be held from March 25-26, 2010 in Montreal. So far, an interesting group of speakers have been recruited and the challenge now is to attract an equally distinguished group of participants! Please visit the conference program at www.mcgill.ca/water2010/programme/ for further details about this conference.

Continue Reading

Best regards,
Lisa

3-5 Humanities Centre
English & Film Studies
University of Alberta
Edmonton, AB
Canada
T6G 2E5

Continue Reading

Environmental Studies Association of Canada (ESAC) / Association canadienne
d’études environnementales (ACEE)
Congrès 2010 Conference
Theme: “Sustainability in a Changing World²
Location: Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec
May 31st – June 1, 2010

Dear ESAC members and ESAC friends:

The ESAC conference is May 31st and June 1st in Concordia University in
Montreal, Canada. The theme of the conference is “Sustainability in a
Changing
World”.

I am writing to make you aware that the deadline for the call for
papers and panel proposals for the 2010 ESAC conference is December
21st, midnight. Please read the call for proposals attached here and submit
an individual paper or a panel.

I would also like to mention that two of our three keynote speakers
have been confirmed. Camilla Toulmin will speak on climate change in
Africa and Bina Agarwal will speak on gender in forest conservation in
Asia. For more information on these speakers, please consult our ESAC
website.

If you wish to propose a paper or a panel the forms are attached and
are available on the ESAC website.

If you are a student and
wish to apply for a travel grant, there is a separate form attached and also
on the  website.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Shirley Thompson
ESAC/ACEE 2010 Conference Chair

Continue Reading

The International Institute of Applied Aesthetics (Lahti, Finland) in
association with the Nordic Society for Aesthetics and the Finnish
Society for Aesthetics will arrange the 2010 annual conference of the
Nordic Society for Aesthetics in Lahti, Finland. The theme of the
conference is “Environment, Aesthetics, and the Arts.”

The environment has been a focus of increasing interest within
aesthetics for the last decades. At the same time, there has been
growing recognition that the term “environment” has come to have
multifarious meanings, referring not solely to natural environments
but also to forms of human environment. This recognition has revealed
a wide array of questions which the notion of environment raises for
aesthetics. Do all things called ‘environment’, for example, in
virtue of merely being environments therefore share enough
aesthetically to warrant a uniform type of aesthetic appreciation for
them all or do different environments call for different forms of
aesthetic appreciation? This expansion of the array of aesthetic
questions related to the environment also provides an opportunity for
a more
extensive appraisal of the status of environmental aesthetics as a
whole. Do the classic texts of environmental aesthetics any longer
give tools for successfully coping with the issues which have more
recently become the center of attention?

Focus on the environment has led also to an enlargement of the scope
of aesthetics to include questions which have initially been raised in
such fields as environmental and architectural studies, ecology,
cultural geography, and sociology. This enlargement has increased the
potential impact of aesthetics on other academic subjects. Another
issue which growing interest in the environment and the resultant
expansion of the field of aesthetics have brought to light is the
relationship between aesthetics and ethics. What, for example, is the
relationship between aesthetic and moral values? Is ethics the mother
of aesthetics, or is it, ultimately, the other way around? These
questions do not concern merely environmental aesthetics, as the
relationship between aesthetics and ethics comes into play in a large
group of questions in the philosophy of art as well. Recently,
empirical and naturalist approaches taking inspiration from
evolutionary theories of human cognition have been offered to answer
such questions, and these types of answers have had some impact in
aesthetics.

Focus on the environment is in many ways relevant also to the
philosophy of art. Natural scenery has been a subject of the visual
arts for centuries, but we usually respond to landscape paintings
differently than we do to natural landscapes. Why is that so, and what
does this difference in response tell us about differences between the
aesthetics of art and the aesthetics of nature? Also,
various forms of contemporary art incorporate objects from the
environment within them, and, consequently, raise from another angle
the question of the relationship between different aesthetic realms.
What sort of relevance, for example, do the putatively-unique features
of nature have for the questions regarding the relationship between
art and aesthetics?

People interested in exploring these issues are asked to send an
abstract of no more than 300 words to iiaa-info@helsinki.fi. Deadline
for abstracts is 31.1.2010. Paper proposals dealing with other issues
in aesthetics are also highly welcome. The time allotted to each paper
is 40 minutes (30 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for
discussion).

Conference venue: Hotel Salpaus, Lahti
(http://www.nexthotels.fi/en/hotels/salpaus/)

Keynote speakers:

Karsten Harries (Yale University)
Nathalie Heinich (EHESS, Centre de recherches sur les arts et le
langage , Paris)
Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson College)
Yrjo Sepanmaa (University of Joensuu)

Contact person:

Kalle Puolakka, University of Helsinki
kalle.puolakka@helsinki.fi

Organizing committee:

Arto Haapala, University of Helsinki
Ossi Naukkarinen, University of Art and Design, Helsinki
Kalle Puolakka, University of Helsinki

Nordic Society for Aesthetics website:
http://www.nsae.au.dk/en/nsae

IIAA website:
http://www.helsinki.fi/taitu/estetiikka/ksei/index.htm

Finnish Society for Aesthetics website:
http://www.estetiikka.fi/

–
Lisa Marika Jokivirta
Junior Lecturer
Master’s Programme in Development & International Cooperation
Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy
Room MaB209
P.O.Box 35
40014 University of Jyväskylä
Finland

Tel +358 (0)14 260 3105
Fax +358 (0)14 260 3101

Continue Reading

Continue Reading

Extended Call for Papers and Added Keynote Speaker

MAUDE BARLOW, ANDREW NIKIFORUK, RICHARD WHITE, VANDANA SHIVA, LEO JACOBS,
MARY SIMON

October 13-16, 2010, Mount Royal University Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

http://www.skies.mtroyal.ca/

The call for papers has been extended to March 1, 2010.  We are especially
interested in additional proposals related to environmental issues in
Mexico or from private sector/corporate stakeholders, but we continue to
welcome any and all proposals that speak to the call.

Call For Papers
This interdisciplinary and cross-cultural gathering welcomes presentations
on the environmental challenges now faced by diverse populations, both
human and nonhuman, in the Western lands of Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

Academics and other stakeholders from the wider community are invited to
participate in this urgent and compelling dialogue. The conference invites
academics from the humanities, social and natural sciences, as well as
activists, businesses, artists and others to speak across the boundaries
that conventionally divide them.

Since both the geographical and critical terrains at issue are
considerable, a wide array of topics and time periods is welcome. The
shared concern will be the interaction between humans and the natural
environment in the context of Western history, geography, climate change,
and commercial/sustainable development of lands and resources.

Possible directions may include, but are not restricted to, the following:

* sustainable economic development
* indigenous ways of knowing
* urbanization/suburban sprawl in the “New West”
* popular culture and the mass media
* literary or filmic representations of natural, urban or
industrial environments
* government action/inaction on the environment
* ecofeminism
* environmental racism and justice
* ecological or ecocritical examinations of particular
Western environs and climes
* specific issues such as the Cophenhagen Summit, Kyoto
Protocol, or oil/tar sands development
* the borderlands of Canada / United States / Mexico
* environmental education in K-12, postsecondary and
community contexts
* historical perspectives
* environmental activism
* environmental law and policy

Proposals of 250 words (attached to an email as a .doc or .docx file) can
be sent to either

Robert Boschman (rboschman@mtroyal.ca) or Mario Trono (mtrono@mtroyal.ca).

New Deadline for Submissions: MARCH 1, 2010

Continue Reading