Conveners: Stefania Barca¹, Giovanni Allegretti¹ e Laura Centemeri²

[¹ Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra (PT) | ² CNRS-Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l'Homme, Aix-en-Provence (FR)]

Although the ecological crisis is increasingly raising global concerns, there is no consensus as to its social and political implications. The environment is, therefore, a symbolic and material playing field, largely dominated by reductionist approaches (technocratic and / or economistic), often unaware of the social dimension of environmental issues, where inequality of the impacts and damages (especially in socio-economic terms) is a particularly important aspect. On the other hand, most new social movements, as well as a growing number of "experts" have expressed a vision of the environmental crisis as manifestation of a social crisis of global dimension. Environmentalism, in fact, is not just a matter of "urgent resolutions" in technical and/or managerial fashion. There is today a non-mainstream environmentalism and environmental justice movements in both the North and the South of the globe, which act upon the perception of an organic unity between environmental and social inequalities.

New theoretical tools have been developed over the past 10-15 years, within the Social Sciences and Humanities, allowing to analyze environmental issues in a less dichotomous and more comprehensive fashion than in the past, beyond usual opposition such as that between environment and society, nature and culture. This call for contributions aims to bring together papers that utilize critical and analytical tools that come from the following research areas: Environmental Justice, Public Health, Ecological Democracy (or Citizenship), Ecological Economics, Political Ecology, Environmental Sociology, Eco-Criticism, Environmental Sociology and Environmental History. The contribution of this issue will therefore be to gather a set of these new approaches to offer a critical reflection on the contemporary environmental crisis.

The suggested topics to be addressed by contributions are:
1. Economic crisis, (de)growth and (un)sustainability (e.g., productive restructuring, “relocalization”, eco-solidarity economy, ecological social networks).
2. Migration and environment (mass dislocations arising from: dam constructions, natural disasters, climate change, depletion of natural resources, national parks, urban regeneration policies, environmental policies and anti-immigration policies).
3. Urban and peri-urban agriculture (food security, healthy food, sustainable agriculture).
4. Bio-cultural diversity (e.g. traditional seeds and medicine, local knowledge, collective ownership).
5. Social impact of new public health risks (e.g. climate change, GMOs, trafficking of toxic waste).
6. Environmental racism (i.e.: charging environmental costs on indigenous populations, ethnic minorities, African descendents).
7. Mega-projects (e.g., communications, mining, energy production) and environmental conflicts.
8. Mobilizations against the privatization of resources (water, seeds, landscape, etc.).
9. New narratives and new languages of the ecological crisis (e.g. ‘the inconvenient truth', national environmental security, green washing, environmental and climate in-justice).

It is hoped that the contributions address the different topics paying attention to two transversal axes of inquiry, namely: the interaction between local and global, with particular focus on what each question implies in terms of North-South relations; and challenges and/or opportunities that each issue poses to democracy and social emancipation.

Proposals should be received by September 30, 2012 at the address rccs@ces.uc.pt and should include: title, abstract (900 characters max.), full paper (which must not exceed 50,000 characters with spaces), brief biographical note (500 characters max.) of the author(s) and an authorization for publication. All details at http://www.ces.uc.pt/rccs/normaspubrccsen.pdf.

The conveners will give notice of the acceptance by the end of October 2012. The RCCS is a peer-reviewed journal published by the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra. It publishes articles in Portuguese and Spanish, but it will always be possible to submit proposals in English, French or Italian. If accepted for publication, articles will be translated into Portuguese.

Website RCSS: http://www.ces.uc.pt/rccs/index.php?id_lingua=2