Telling a Different Story – Religion, Extractivism and (Green) Colonialism in Europe
Welcome to a conference that explores the intersections of religion, spirituality, colonial legacies, and ecological sustainability in European contexts. It encourages a conversation across disciplines with a particular focus on extractivism – including forestry, mining, and other forms of land and resource exploitation. The conference addresses how religious traditions have contributed to extractivism in the past, but have the potential to challenge prevailing drivers, practices and attitudes toward the more-than-human world.
The conference creates space, within the context of the Nordics, for analysis through Indigenous and other marginalized perspectives of ecological debates. It also offers an opportunity to critically examine real life dilemmas and extractivist paradigms while exploring alternative economic, ethical, and spiritual relationships to forests, land, and ecosystems.
These concerns, however, resonate far beyond the Nordic region, and so the conference welcomes perspectives from all over the world. As Europe continues to grapple with the ecological consequences of its colonial past, there is an urgent need to imagine new narratives and practices for a more equitable and justice-based transition—where religious traditions and concrete questions of land use are central.
Call for papers
Papers are invited on any aspect of the conference theme, and will be presented throughout the conference in a series of parallel sessions. Papers may be considered for a publication planned to come out of the conference.
Offers of papers are welcome from established scholars, early career researchers, postgraduate students, as well as undergraduate students, and those with a postgraduate research interest in these topics, as well as artists, activists and practitioners.
Abstracts (c. 200 words) of a paper to be delivered in a maximum of 20 minutes (followed by 20 minutes discussion), together with a short author bio (100 words) and contact information, should be sent to Ida Simonsson (ida.simonsson@ehs.se) by December 10th.
Conference fee: 150 €, including two lunches and “fika” (coffee/tea + refreshments during breaks). Participants will also be offered an inexpensive and tasty vegan dinner at their own expense.