Agnes Bolsø, Norwegian University of Science & Technology, NORWAY

Christine Katz, University of Lueneburg, GERMANY

Mary Phillips, University of Bristol, ENGLAND

Ida Sabelis, VU University, Amsterdam, NETHERLANDS 

There is broad agreement that the Earth is warming, and the impacts of climate change such as loss of polar and glacial ice and more frequent and more intense severe weather events such as heat waves, storms and cold, are beginning to become ever-more apparent. Insidious environmental degradation continues apace. Yet, politicians and the business community seem paralysed and efforts to address ecological crises have been described as a dismal failure (Wittneben, Okereke, Banerjee & Levy 2012). Organizational responses are characterized by a business case approach based on obtaining competitive advantage (Bansal & Roth 2000), finding a technical fix (Boiral, Cayer, & Baron 2009) and greenwashing (Walker & Wan 2012). Banerjee notes that: ‘Rather than reshaping markets and production processes to fit the logic of nature, sustainable development uses the logic of markets and capitalist accumulation to determine the future of nature’ (Banerjee 2003:153). The primacy of market forces, economic progress and technology remains largely unquestioned such that current discursive formations and material practices of organizational sustainability limit possibilities for transformative change. 

The environment/nature is thus presented as a risk that should be ameliorated through mastery and domination or a market opportunity to be appropriated, commodified and consumed (Banerjee, 2003). Conceptualising the natural world in this way is grounded in what Connell (1995) has referred to as hegemonic masculinity. Masculinity is aligned with reason, rationality and the human mind which devalues the feminine, emotion, the body and the natural world (Lloyd 1993). This is a long-established argument made by feminist philosophies, but its treatment has tended to focus on the implications for gender, instead of what it might mean for gender and nature. Feminist approaches to environmental sustainability have  developed in response to the ways in which ‘woman’ and ‘nature’ are conceptually linked in Western thought, wherein the processes of inferiorization have been mutually reinforcing. In so doing, such approaches have the potential to mount a radical challenge to current organizational and academic discourses and practices surrounding sustainability, social responsibility and justice (Plumwood, 1993). This Special Issue will explore the relation between the gendered nature of such discourses and practices and current debates surrounding sustainability in studies of work and organization.

The Special Issue therefore provides an arena through which gendered approaches to environmental sustainability can be further developed in studies of organization especially within the context of environmental uncertainty and crisis. There has been a lack of gendered analysis, including feminist and philosophical analysis, in the field of sustainability and organizational sustainability and we wish to address this. We invite philosophical, theoretical and empirical papers that explore a gendered, and particularly feminist, commitment, practice and politics to the study of gender and nature in the field of work and organization relating to the environment, sustainability and social justice. We argue, following Phillips (2014), that a feminist environmental ethics can provide a critical analysis of the gendered ways in which organizations, and organization studies, represent, construct and appropriate nature, and how that might be subverted and re-imagined to interrogate relations of power, resistance and politics. Indeed does feminism and eco/environmental feminism enable a radical challenge to the field of gender and organization broadly, and sustainability specifically? However, we also acknowledge the problematics within current eco/environmental feminist philosophy in areas such as engaging with post-colonial thought, the representation/appropriation of indigenous voices and practices, corporeality and embodiment and approaches to an ethics of care and we particularly welcome submissions that move these debates forward.

36th Ethnography in Education Research Forum February 27-28, 2015

Given the vast array of reforms that are at play in and transforming the landscape of education, how can ethnographers contribute to more insightful analyses of the interplay of inequality, poverty, and educational experiences and outcomes, particularly with economic disparities growing in our current era? How might ethnographers continue to challenge problematic and pathologizing assumptions to provide more powerful explanations of the influence of poverty and racialized class inequality on education?

At a time dominated by high stakes testing and increased surveillance in educational settings, ethnographers have an ever-increasing role to play in reframing dominant discourses of accountability in policy and practice conversations. A primary purpose of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Urban Ethnography (CUE) from its founding in 1970, and of the Ethnography in Education Research Forum since its beginnings in 1980, has been to encourage and support field research applying anthropological, folkloristic and linguistic skills to the study of American cities, with priority given to the study of ethnic groups in Philadelphia. An early CUE research effort was an ethnographic project in Philadelphia public schools directed toward collaborative monitoring of the effects and consequences of programs and policies in terms of countering educational inequities and advancing social justice.

In keeping with this research tradition, and in today’s transformed educational landscape, the 36th Ethnography Forum invites exploration of methodological alternatives and modes of collaboration in ethnographic research on education. How do proposals such as ethnographic monitoring, practitioner inquiry, decolonizing methodologies, culturally responsive methodologies, and other participatory ethnographic approaches invite, value and respect the teachers, learners, schools and communities we work with? How might ethnographers invite deeper engagement and self-reflection by all of us as we work to create more socially just educational policies and practices?

For more information about the Ethnography in Education Forum, visit http://www.gse.upenn.edu/cue/forum or email cue@gse.upenn.edu.

For proposal submission, visit http://www.conftool.com/forum2015/. The proposal deadline is October 1, 2014.

See proposal guidelines on the attached file [Only on MyUMBC Groups]

Georgetown University Graduate Student Conference

Date: February 27 - 28, 2015 Georgetown University

Heidi Byrnes, Georgetown University

Anna De Fina, Georgetown University

With the publication of the Modern Language Association's 2007 Report "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World", the terms multilingualism and multiculturalism have received heightened attention and been expanded to include the ideas of translingual and transcultural competence. While many scholars have defined multilingualism as the ability to communicate in more than one language (Cenoz, Hufeisen, & Jessner, 2003; Li, 2008), other conceptualizations, particularly those influenced by third language acquisition studies and functional definitions of language, reconceive multilingualism as the ability to use multiple languages as “resources” contingent upon communicative needs and social contexts (Cenoz, 2013). 

Even as definitions of multilingualism expand, as seen in scholarly contributions to the "Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 33, (2013)", it is still refracted most typically through the lens of monolingualism and conceptualized through nation-state-centered perspectives (Yildiz, 2012). To address this concern, scholarly work is now exploring such concepts as transculturalism and -lingualism, which are being defined as the studies of power relationships/formations and meaning-making in language throughout history as one acknowledges the multiplicity of one's identity and position in the nation state (Cuccioletta, 2002; Lewis, 2002).  Within this field, scholars (e.g., Appadurai, 1996; Bhaba, 1990; Mani, 2007; Seyhan, 2001) explore aesthetics, political claims, and such phenomena as cosmopolitan citizenship that unsettle concepts of home, belonging, and culture, which can redress the ruptures in history, collective memory, and language. In light of widespread globalization, we are interested in definitions of multi/translingualism, multi/transculturalism, and related terms that move away from essentialized and idealized notions of the nation-state (Cook, 1992; Kramsch, 2014). We are also interested in exploring the critical relationships between how multilingualism/multiculturalism is acquired in educational and other contexts, reflected upon and portrayed in artistic-literary-social media, and acknowledged, valued, or rejected in political and institutional action.

Keeping these foci and associated challenges in mind, our conference engages multilingualism and multiculturalism with an explicitly critical orientation in order to refine these terms in light of research and practice in literary and visual cultural criticism, history, linguistics, anthropology, and second/third/foreign language teaching and learning.

Possible topics for 20-minute presentations include but are not limited to:

Please submit abstracts of 250--300 words (including paper title, institutional affiliation and contact details) by 17 October 2014 to GUGradConference@gmail.com. Notification of acceptances will be sent by 1 November 2014. The conference will begin 27 Feb. at 3:00pm and end 28 Feb. at 7:00pm. 

For More information, please visit website.