In 2012, we discuss the topic "How do you manage? Unravelling the situated practice of environmental management", as the Call for Papers coined it, together with twenty scholars. A preparatory session for this workshop has been held in 2011 at the 10th IAS-STS conference at Graz, Austria. For this workshop, we are glad to receive support from Bielefeld University's Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF).
This theme is primarily focused on understanding environmental management as a ‘socio-natural assemblage’ (Bakker, 2010). As assemblages are structured through ‘critical reflection, debate, and contest’ (Collier, 2006, p. 400) by engaging environmental management, our attempt here is to explore the multiple possibilities of reinventing the politics of nature.
What are the objects of EM? What makes environmental entities an object?
Does the natural environment (both animate and inanimate) consist of passive matter? Or is it lively, vibrant and vital (Dobson 2011)? What are the implications of perceiving things as passive objects?
Under the label of ‘performance and imaginaries’ we address a key set of questions for the workshop. Performance is a concept that has been developed to emphasise the particular aspects of the practices that constitute social and ecological forms and processes. Szerszynski et al (2003) summarise that performance points suggests practices, often iterative ones that constitute or bring about phenomena that would not exist without this (regular) activity. They continue that this practice always stands in a creative tension with a corresponding script or precedent, which informs that practice, but from which the practice inevitable departs to some extent.
The workshop is structured into four themes:
In the received view, environmental management presupposes plans and ideas: management has objectives, such as reaching a specific point or reaching a dynamic trajectory around a certain state. Two examples should suffer: the former might be the re-introduction of a specific species; or an example for the kind of target might be ensuring a specified continuing yield of resources. In response, critics conceptualise a rationality, mostly imagined as a singular but multi-backgrounded phenomenon - such as The Western, Capitalist and/or Masculine rationality of Rational Control5/6 (and opposed to an Ecological Rationality7/8) - which is heralded by hegemonic players.
At the 10th Annual IAS-STS Conference Critical Issues in Science and Technology Studies (May 2-3, 2011 at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society - Graz, Austria) we have brought together several researchers to discuss the study of situated practices of managing environments: For that we have designed a session in which Ingmar Lippert, Silvia Bruzzone, Franz Krause, Anna Schreuer and Gerald Aiken contributed analytically and empirically to the topic.
Interdisciplinary workshop 29 May to 2 June 2012, Germany (Bielefeld University: Center for Interdisciplinary Research).
People manage their environments, all of us in everyday life, and some more specifically as professionals. Many of the decisions we take and activities we practice, both in everyday life and in professional roles, have multiple and heterogeneous consequences for our environments. Yet, often a particular set of practices is delineated as environmental management and assumed to contribute to "sustainability". In this workshop, however, we will discuss environmental management as a practice, as a situated unfolding of social relationships, desires, routines, and materials. Thereby, we aim to gain insight into some of the processes by which sustainability and unsustainability are being produced (Blühdorn and Welsh 20071).
