International Conference on Canadian Studies at Centre for Canadian Studies, Jadavpur University, 14-15 February, 2023
Deadline: January 26, 2023
Humanities and social sciences have already made the inevitable inter-disciplinary turn towards an understanding of the natural sciences which deal with ecology and the environment. This turntowards the natural sciences, needless to say, takes into account the nuances of how humans have inhabited, changed, and engaged with the planet. Nature and environment are comprehended as entities that cannotbe understood holistically if the functioning of human agency is discounted. Human agency and the activities that they manifest have apparently caused some irreversible changes tothe planet and hence their contributions in terms of how the ecosystems develop, falter, and function cannot be ignored anymore (Dipesh Chakraborty, 2021).These activities also involve steps that proceed towards different conservationist and sustenance practices— and not just resource extraction, pollution, technological ravage and other negative practiceswhich are often conflated as sole features that define the human relationship with natureand the environment. Though scholars are at a quandary with respect to realising if the ‘negative’ effects of human agency on nature are irreconcilable or not, efforts to understand the consequences of the environment/environmental change on human historyare also being undertaken in the humanities worldwide. This attention has opened up newer ways of looking at phenomena like imperialism, colonialism, post-colonialism, and globalisation. In a colonial and neo-colonial order, environmental degradation, or in other words, ‘taming of nature’, is often validated by asserting the need of a progressive nation that is open to the idea of a technological boom (Ursula Heise, 2006).This dependence on technology for the functioning of our lives— the over-encompassing influence of the ‘technosphere’ — is apparently very difficult to exterminate.It has percolated and intermeshed itself inextricably in our relationship/understanding of the ecologiesthat we inhabit (Peter Haff, 2014;2017). Nonetheless, humans have also proceeded towards the realisation that it is the ‘world’ that will precede and succeed them and stand testament to the inter-generational time and values. Hence a lot of attention has been directed towards the redressal of the ‘irreconcilable changes’ that human activities have caused to the environment — climate change being one of them Climate activists, conservationists, and sustenance policy makers (like David Suzuki in Canada) have emerged globally to address and redress these changes and have tried to contest the very utility-based relationship humans have with the environment. This requires individuals to go beyond an understanding of human engagement with nature as ‘means’ to a beneficial (mostly monetary) ‘end’, and to denounce an existent hierarchisation between different species that inhabit an ecosystem (Arne Naess 1989).
