Abstracts accepted in English.
Edward Huijbens
Michael Haldrup
Martin Gren
This panel session proposal will further elaborate and discuss the questions and challenges posed by Huijbens and Gren (2022) and Haldrup (2023). The point of departure is the fact that abrupt climate change and “terra-cide” (Escobar 2022) is now playing out on the earthly scene at a pace viscerally comprehensible to us humans and our fleeting existence. As Greta Thunberg puts it: “I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is” (Thunberg 2019, p.24). To say that “our house is on fire” is also to recognize that the Earth and humans are parts of a common planetary wicked problem rapidly mutating, and that we all, humans and more-than/non-human cohabitants are critically in need of a politics for “landing on Earth” (Latour and Weibel 2020). Speaking from a geo-graphical perspective we note that our planet has primarily been conceptualized as Earth’s surface on which humans as social subjects have made their spatial imprints. Calls and movements for putting terra viva (Shiva 2015) or buen vivir (Escobar 2022) as the center of our planetary imaginations. Such calls, however, still however have only minor influence on geographical thought more generally. In this panel we want to re-frame socio-spatial theorizing in the light of current states of earthly emergencies calling for new ways of planetary dialogue and feeling (Yusoff 2018; Haldrup, Samson and McGowan 2020; Mbembe 2022), acknowledging its insufficiency and obsolescence in facing the wicked Earth of the Anthropocene and its planetary entanglements.