Experiencing Climate and Environmental Changes in and Beyond Europe

Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU), Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana

Venue:

ZRC SAZU, Prešern Hall Novi trg 4, Ljubljana

May 5th - 7th, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2022

Organisers: Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU); Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana (UL); Department of Studies in Culture and Religion, University of Hradec Králové (UHK), Arctic Centre, University of Groningen (UG), University of Tartu (UT), Tallinn University (TU)

Organising Committee: Nataša Gregorič Bon (ZRC SAZU), Jaka Repič, (UL), Ana Svetel (UL), Blaž Bajič (UL), Zdenka Sokolíčková (UHK/UG), Aet Annist (UT/TU)

In recent decades, we have been witnessing accelerating climate and environmental processes that are transforming landscapes and changing lives, both on local as well as global scales. Climate change is an “existentially urgent” (O’Reilly, et al. 2020) issue, but is often perceived and discussed as a “conceptually abstract problem” (Knox 2020). This symposium explores how environmental and climate changes and continuities are experienced, sensed, and lived in and beyond Europe; and how they are entangled with social and cultural processes, imaginings, hopes and expectations. It attends to how growing carbon emissions, consequences of rising sea levels, severe river management and subsequent erosion, deforestation, growing wildfires, melting glaciers, recurrent droughts, floods etc., affect ways of being and becoming in different locations. Our aim is to question what ontologies, epistemologies, technologies, practices and potentialities appear or disappear when faced with new climate and environmental realities. This will allow us to revisit and further complicate the prevalent meanings of the notions such as “environment”, “climate”, “change”, “sustainability”, “adaptation”, “resilience” and “vulnerability”.

PROGRAMME

Venue: Prešern Hall, ZRC SAZU Novi trg 4
1000 Ljubljana

DAY 1 – May 5th 2022

9.00-9.30: Welcome by Organisers

9.30-10.30: Keynote Thomas Hylland Eriksen Some Unintended Consequences of Modernity

10.30-11.00: Break

11.00-13.00: Session 1, Convened by Ana Svetel, University of Ljubljana

Arctic Change and the Built Environment

Peter Schweitzer, University of Vienna

Permafrost Thaw, Infrastructure and Community Development: Navigating Socio-Economic and Environmental Change in Northern Yakutia, Russia
Olga Povoroznyuk, University of Vienna

Stories of Changing Human-water Relations from Svalbard: Forms, Agencies and Ripple Effects
Zdenka Sokolíčková, University of Hradec Králové and University of Groningen; Esteban Ramirez Hincapié, University of Groningen; Jasmine Zhang, University of Agricultural Sciences Upsala; Ann E. Lennert, University of Tromsø

Continuity and Change in Vjosa River Valley, Southern Albania

Nataša Gregorič Bon, Urša Kanjir & Liza Stančič, ZRC SAZU

13.00-14.00: Lunch

14.00-15.30: Session 2, Convened by Blaž Bajič, University of Ljubljana

Pollution and its Metaphors: Climate Change in Serbia

Maja Petrović-Šteger, ZRC SAZU

“I Always Get the Same Feeling in the Spring”: Living with the Seasonal Landscape and Changing Environment in Northeastern Iceland
Ana Svetel, University of Ljubljana

Three Walks and a ZOOM: Researching, Imagining, and Walking with Rižana River in NE Adriatic
Nataša Rogelja Caf, ZRC SAZU

15.30-16.00: Break

16.00-17.00 Student’s Session, Convened by Zdenka Sokolíčková,

University of Hradec Králové and University of Groningen

Walking the AnthropoCZene: Ethnography of a Changing Landscape

Helena Böhmová, University of Hradec Králové

Local Perception of Landscape Changes in a Solčava Mountain Village

Elizabeta Vršnik, University of Ljubljana

19.00: Dinner

DAY 2 – May 6th 2022 9.00-9.30: Welcome

9.30-10.30: Keynote Marc A. Brightman
Energy Futures, Green Growth and Resurgent Life in an Adriatic Water Margin

10.30-11.00: Break

11.00-13.00: Session 3, Convened by Jaka Repič, ZRC SAZU

“It’s the Voices of People who Think they Know Better”: Examining Emplaced Climate Scepticism in Rural Northern Sweden (presentation via Zoom)
Flora Bartlett, Goldsmiths London

Rethinking Environmental Justice in the Post-socialist City Context: More-than-human Vulnerabilities to Environmental and Climate Changes in Tallinn’s Informal Green Spaces (Presentation via Zoom) Bianka Plüschke-Altof, Piret Vacht and Karina Vabson, Tallinn University

Temporal and Spatial Disorders in the Alpine Cryosphere – And What to do Now and Here?
Herta Nöbauer, University of Vienna

Future Making – Future Taking: Environmental Change and Socio- Economic Transformations in Indonesian Borneo (Presentation via Zoom)
Michaela Haug, University of Cologne

13.00-14.00: Lunch

14.00-15.30: Session 4, Convened by Nataša Gregorič Bon, ZRC SAZU Ecology of Farming, Mountain Pastoralism and Tourism in North- western Slovenia
Jaka Repič, University of Ljubljana

Environmental Experiences and Attitudes of Older Czechs in the Time of Accelerating Climate Change
Vojtěch Pelikán, Masaryk University

Land and Ancestry in Solčavsko: Between Change and Changelessness

Blaž Bajič & Veronika Zavratnik, University of Ljubljana

15.30-16.00: Break 16.00-16.45

Closing Session

DAY 3

Excursion to Bohinj.