YHYS Colloquium

The 23th annual colloquium of the Finnish Society for Environmental Social Sciences (YHYS) will be held at the University of Lapland, Rovaniemi. The theme of the colloquium is Naturecultures.

The programme includes keynote speeches, panel discussions, workshops and a pre-conference Hyde Park meeting for doctoral researchers.

Ecological compensation, biodiversity offsetting, no net loss of biodiversity, ecosystem services, low-carbon economy, ecoinnovation, circular economy, zero waste, active energy citizenship, resilience and bioeconomy. These are examples of concepts that have in the past few years steered the conversations of the management of natural resources, environmental protection and environmental politics and greatly influenced political agendas. A growing awareness of the climate change, of the sixth wave of extinction and of other irreversible changes in our environment has influenced the emergence of re-conceptualizations of the eco-sociality of societies. It has sensitized subjects to identify the most critical question for the future policies and research: How to comprehend the co-existence of nature and society.

Environmental social sciences have indicated long ago how the problems of the society’s relation with nature originate from the profoundly—and problematically—established divide between culture and nature, located in the western thought. The persistent modernist bifurcations form an obstacle to perceiving that human communities do not only live from the land, but live and breathe with the land– and with non-human others.

In the past few years, the emerging multidisciplinary discussion on naturecultures has unsettled the established fields of politics of nature and natural resources, political ecology, and environmental ethics by providing alternative, supplementary, reciprocal and ethically sustainable forms of knowing. The naturecultural theorizing has offered new conceptualizations for thinking about being-in-the-world and for re-establishing the relationship with the land by drawing open-mindedly from the traditions of natural sciences, social sciences, philosophy, and arts.