Volume 23, Number 4, 2024 Special Issue: Climate Action Task Force 2023 Plenary Lecture and Forum

EN:

This special issue emerges out of the plenary lecture sponsored by the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Climate Action Task Force at the AAG Annual Meeting in April 2023. The lecture was the opening session of a “node” based in Montreal. The issue comprises revised versions of the original lecture and the comments offered by three respondents, as well as an essay inspired by the node. All the pieces consider academic (in)mobility, the need to transform institutional practices and how to do so in a way that advances social justice rather than reproducing unjust hierarchies and exclusions.

EN:

Just geographies of academic mobilities recognize the complicity of some forms of academic work with fossil fuel extraction and combustion. The necessity for academics to be mobile is entrenched through disciplinary norms and social values, as well as academic structures characterized by precarious work contracts and policies of internationalization, and is often reliant on highly polluting air transport. In the absence of climate-compatible techno-solutions enabling business-as-usual aeromobilities, we – the aeromobile publics – need to rethink our practices. These practices, and their unjust impacts, are incongruent with critical geographical scholarship. In this paper I begin to theorize just geographies of academic mobilities in the climate crisis. I do so by engaging with feminist climate justice, just mobilities and radical mobilities to consider the inequities within and beyond academic mobilities. I signal the ways that academic mobilities relate to broader patterns of education, labor market practices, and economic models, and how these together reinforce the discursive and lived power of the mobile academic work/life. I suggest that a starting point for just geographies of academic mobilities should be redressing asymmetries in geographies of knowledge production and signal 7 initial actions with the potential to initiate more just forms of climate changed academic mobilities.

EN:

Addressing academic mobilities in a time of climate breakdown requires a transformation in social values, behaviors, and systems. Our related task is twofold. First, scholars must foster knowledge production and circulation that 1) challenge a status quo that stems from colonial, capitalist, and racist histories and 2) are consistent with an inclusive, equitable, and low-impact academy. Second, we must strive for just geographies in an unjust world of climate, socioecological, and academic disparities. Such goals necessitate working for far-reaching changes within academic institutions as well as for systemic change in the broader world.

EN:

This article invites reflection on possible paths toward a more equitable way of conducting research, which involve both decarbonizing academia and decolonizing knowledge production. Drawing on the work of Hopkins, I explore how academic travel perpetuates colonialist and capitalist power structures, often marginalizing scholars from the Majority World. In this vein, I propose four strategies to foster just geographies of knowledge, including prioritizing North-South articulation with the Majority World, promoting multilingualism, advocating for the redistribution of resources and recognition of locally produced academic knowledge, as well as exploring the potential of virtual conferencing as spaces where multilingual and multi-location dialogue can be embraced. Ultimately, I posit that embracing a more equitable approach to research serves as a pathway to decarbonizing academia.

ES:

Este artículo invita a la reflexión sobre posibles caminos hacia una forma más equitativa de realizar investigación, que incluyen tanto la descarbonización de la academia como la descolonización de la producción de conocimiento. Basándome en el trabajo de Hopkins, exploro cómo los viajes académicos perpetúan estructuras de poder colonialistas y capitalistas, marginando con frecuencia a académicos del Mundo Mayoritario. En esta línea, propongo cuatro estrategias para promover una geografía del conocimiento más justa, que incluyen priorizar la articulación Norte-Sur con el Mundo Mayoritario, promover el multilingüismo, abogar por una redistribución de recursos y reconocimiento del conocimiento académico producido localmente, así como explorar el potencial de las conferencias virtuales como espacios donde se puede fomentar el diálogo multilingüe y multiubicación. Sostengo que adoptar un enfoque más equitativo hacia la investigación es un paso crucial hacia la descarbonización de la academia.

EN:

Engaging Debbie Hopkin’s arguments on fly less or no fly movements, this essay reflects on faculty efforts to reduce aviation-related emissions at the University of British Columbia.

EN:

The term “slow scholarship” has become increasingly prominent in academia in recent years. It is an analytical framework for critiquing the neoliberalization and corporatization of the academy, and the associated “speeding up” of academic labor. The phrase also serves as a call to transform institutions of higher education so that they are more responsive to the needs of academic workers and the students whom they serve. For proponents of slow scholarship, such a transformation necessitates a stretching out of time, a slowing down, to allow for enhanced reflection and inquiry. Missing thus far from the discussion of slow scholarship is how energy, particularly of a fossil-fueled variety, facilitates the speed-up of the academy. Indeed, the “fast” academy requires high levels of energy consumption. Employing a political ecology lens, we thus seek to enlarge the scope of slow scholarship, while pushing for a broader and deeper political project. We contend that a more expansive slow scholarship requires grappling with energy consumption and mobility as well as their associated inequities. This entails, as we explore in the conclusion, a project of justice that transcends the boundaries of the academy. Such a project involves “stretching the boundaries of care” to recognize, include and transform the human and non-human assemblages that help make contemporary academia possible.