3Sers Elliot Honeybun-Arnolda and Martin Mahony have reopened a call for papers on ‘Historical geographies of environmental futures’ for the RGS-IBG 2021 Annual Conference.

Their session, sponsored by the Historical Geography Research Group (HGRG) of the RGS-IBG, aims to bring to light diverse visions of environmental futures, to understand their relationship to the spaces and places from which they emanate, and to make sense of their transformation over time. They welcome contributions which engage with future-making practices not only in science, policy and industry but also in NGOs, education, and religious and social movements, and which examine practices from numerical modelling and scenario-building to prophesy and divination.

They especially invite submissions that engage with the following questions:

1. How and why have particular visions of environmental futures gained traction, or failed to do so, in different times and places?
2. How have dominant visions of environmental futures channelled political action in certain directions?
3. What is the relationship between the spaces in which future-knowledge is constructed, and the spaces that such knowledge helps produce?
4. Environmental futures before ‘the environment’ – how can the conceptual history of the environment help us to refine our understanding of the genealogy of the future?
5. How has the discipline of geography historically functioned as a site of environmental future-making?
6. What is the impact of past future-making practices on present-day environmental discourse?   

Please send abstracts to Elliot Honeybun-Arnolda and Martin Mahony at e.honeybun-arnold@uea.ac.uk by 19^th February.