Interdisciplinary Workshop on Environmental Justice and Time

The workshop seeks to bring together scholars working on issues related to environmental justice and time from different disciplinary perspectives from the fields of ecology, biology, engineering, environmental history, sociology, philosophy, law, international relations, environmental economics, and related disciplines.

Further information:

The relationship between nature and society raises a variety of justice questions that no single academic discipline has provided sufficient answers to; environmental justice rather needs to be addressed in a multi-disciplinary effort.

One aspect that has received relatively little attention is how natural agents have imposed certain scales and paces of time on political and judicial processes. While we are familiar with talk about ‘crisis’ and scenarios of the end time, the more specific relationship between environmental justice and time has not yet been systematically explored. Recent court cases have highlighted the question of time for achieving environmental justice: as natural and ecological processes develop according to their own time, this has implications for that can be deemed just and fair in politics, the economy and society. Time is also relevant for intergenerational justice concerns; these include debates that are not only relevant in moral philosophy, but also in other arts and humanities disciplines and the social sciences. Not least, the natural sciences also relate to intergenerational perspectives, due to their central contribution to thinking temporality beyond a human scale.

Our workshop seeks to bring together scholars working on issues related to environmental justice and time from different disciplinary perspectives from the fields of ecology, biology, engineering, environmental history, sociology, philosophy, law, international relations, environmental economics, and related disciplines.