Time and place: October 9, 2023; 12:15–14:00 CEST; Georg Morgenstiernes Hus, Room 452 and on Zoom (link for virtual participation will be distributed via the Dynamic Territory list; to join the list email anna.wienhues@ifikk.uio.no)
Laÿna Droz holds a doctorate in ethics and environmental policy from Kyoto University and she is the author of a book entitled The Concept of Milieu in Environmental Ethics, Individual Responsibility within an Interconnected World. Her recent work concerns the meta-ethics of biodiversity knowledge. After postdoctoral research at the Basque Climate Change Research Centre and the Rachel Carson Center in Germany, she is currently working at the University of Tokyo, in the Faculty of Frontier Sciences.
Conceptual ping-pong: Environmental discourses and identity politics in Asia
Environmental issues are closely related to natural resources use and ownership, namely, they are tied to local social, political, cultural and legal specificities. This local context contrasts with scientific discourses that tend to uproot environmental issues into abstract generalised models. On the one hand, by focusing on natural processes approached through a scientific perspective that aims to be as neutral as possible, environmental issues can be presented as easily translatable across cultures; as “we all share similar challenges facing climate change and pollution”. On the other hand, environmental issues can be framed in terms of tensions and conflicts between social, cultural or political groups and can be used instrumentally to support interests unrelated to environmental sustainability. This ambivalence renders environmental discourses slippery in terms of potential political interpretations that link the explanations and proposed solutions to environmental degradation to identity politics. Several processes can be at play at this intersection, including eco-dogmatism, ecological nationalism, eco-orientalism and auto-orientalism. This presentation will explore these processes in view of the dynamics between conceptualizations of the “we”, the “other” and “nature”. These dynamics will be illustrated with examples from environmental discourses that are intertwined with identity politics in Asia. It will show how some ideas are exchanged between political contexts, reappropriated and reinterpreted in a form of conceptual ping-pong across cultures.
'DynamiTE lunchtime seminars' are a part of the project 'Dynamic Territories'. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 948964).