Frontiers of Climate Change and Extinction: Rendering Worlds Familiar and Strange

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

How are frontiers (for instance, the “new frontier” of Mars, the Arctic as the “final frontier”) being identified, and what are the transnational politics of access? How are innovations in science and technology informing ways in which frontiers are being interpreted and actualized as accessible, and how is that access variously framed politically, economically and ethically? How is climate change an ethical boundary involving social structures and behaviors? This panel seeks papers that probe the intersection of frontiers, climate change, technoscience and exploration, bringing new perspectives to the rendering of worlds familiar and strange. Papers may include a wide range of subjects, including indigeneity, extinction tourism, governmentality, travel, resource extraction, neoliberal capitalism, markets, technologies, “vanishing” people and worlds, national identity, alterity, migration, neocolonialism, media, cultural policies, cultural memory, civilizationist rhetoric, human exceptionalism, spectacle, performativity, the politics of spectatorship, and the interplay of “nature” and “culture”.

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chair

• Annette Bickford, York University

Individual Presentations

• Extinction Tourism: Climate Change, Artic Human Zoos and the Politics of Spectatorship - Annette Bickford, York University

• Genetics as a New Frontier for Environmental Climate Change Responses - Valerie Berseth, Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia; Tim Hawkins, Department of Forest Resources Management, University of British Columbia; Jordan Tesluk, Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia; Ralph Matthews, Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia

• Media and Transnational Climate Justice: Indigenous Activism and Climate Politics - Matthew Tegelberg, York University

• How Controversies Start a New Life: GMO and Non-GMO soybean Sustainable Certification - Julia Silvia Guivant, federal university of santa catarina