FUTURENVIRONET: RESEARCH NETWORK ON FUTURE MAKING IN ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

This project aims at creating a Research Network composed of researchers, students and civil society organizations working on the production of environmental futures by civil society organizations within the context of socio-environmental conflicts in different European (and/or Global) localities. Theoretically, we are interested in debates on everyday temporalities and futures (hope, aspiration, expectation, anticipation, etc.) and their role in social movements, affects, the production of political subjectivities, all within a political and moral economy framework. Methodologically, our approach is based on qualitative methods (ethnography, qualitative sociology) and interdisciplinary (across urban studies, environmental anthropology, anthropology/sociology of ethics and morality). Our plan is to set up a European Research Network that includes undergraduate and graduate students of the partner universities with the aim of mapping environmental conflicts in Europe (and beyond), and thinking, together with civil society organizations, about environmental futures in contexts of socio-environmental conflicts. Thus, the network aims at bridging academia and civil society in the shared effort of analysing our environmental futures together. For this 5th seed funding call (june 2023-may 2024), the aim is to establish the network through the organization of three online workshops (july 2023, nov 2023, feb 2024) and one in-person workshop (may 2024) in Mar Menor (Region of Murcia, Spain), a salty lagoon which has been given rights as an ecosystem after civil society organizations successfully mobilized. The plan is to locate and map socio-environmental conflicts nearby the regiones of this project’s partners Universities, and get in touch with civil society organizations to invite them to be part of the project. Once they have agreed, to do some preliminary research via focus groups and/or exploratory interviews with participants selected through structural sampling. The workshops would aim at planning the steps in the creation of the network, organizing preliminary research, sharing the preliminary findings, and organizing the goals and infrastructure (location [online or in-presence], finding appropriate translation services, etc.) of the civil society organizations meeting. Depending on the final budget (and on the availavility and/or possibility of partner universities’ own funding), at least one representative of one organization per locality would come to the final workshop in Mar Menor to participate as a speaker and get to know civil organizations there. If this sounds as something you would like to be part of, get in touch. We are in search of potential partners! (students, researchers and civil society organizations)