David Mabb Poster

Claps of Thunder: Disaster Communism, Extinction Capitalism and How to Survive Tomorrow

Central London, 7-10 November 2019

FINAL DEADLINE EXTENSION TO 10  JUNE 2019 at midnight GMT

For all queries, email only please: historicalmaterialism@soas.ac.uk

For the other call for papers and further details about the conference, please go here.

To submit a paper, go here.

Call for Papers for the Marxist-Feminist Stream

Capital and life are in a deadly opposition. The social capacities for making and maintaining life are increasingly under threat. From conditions of birth —reproductive rights, access to healthcare— to simple provisions that can ensure dignity in old age —pensions, social security— the life cycle of the majority is now marked by food shortage, poisoned water, and school closures. In decimating social provisioning, capitalism undermines our collective life-making, but the harm is no longer limited to the ‘social’ - and whether capitalism was ever limited to the ‘social’ or the ‘economic’ is worth revisiting. What is certainly the case is that capitalism’s relentless accumulation drive has triggered climate change, threatening all life as we know it. 

Whereas social movements increasingly respond to the urgency of our planetary predicament under capitalism, eco-politics is often caught in the ideological traps of contemporary capitalism - for instance, in France Macron’s fuel tax, which was presented as an eco-tax, became the excuse for expropriating further the working classes and triggered the Yellow Vests movement; or, as in ecofascism, where exclusionary-racist violence is used as an excuse for defending the land against climate change. This convoluted and not always progressive landscape of eco-politics is where Marxist feminism must intervene in bringing forth nuanced analyses and radical propositions concerning the needs of life versus the needs of capital.

Feminists have been thinking about and resisting these and other environmental crises at least since the early 1970s. Today, eco-feminist ideas about women’s spiritual or conceptual connection to nature have in some cases given way to more materialist understandings. Rather than stretching women’s innate connection to nature, they analyse and politicise around women’s historically evolved connection to land, water and bodies – all of which are mediated by the various relations of exploitation and oppression; and, all of which come into conflict with capital’s relentless expansion and development supported by techno-scientific knowledge regimes on the one hand and imperialist and settler colonialist forces on the other.  

This year, the Marxist-Feminist Stream of Historical Materialism 2019 invites papers that address (but are not restricted to) broadly conceived environmental feminist perspectives on themes such as:

- Reproductive health and social policy

- The relationship of climate justice to gender justice

- Gender and the politics of climate migration

- Agricultural work and agribusiness

- Water politics, food production, gendered and racial struggles

- Gendered and racialised science

- Indigenous environmentalism and radical ecopedagogy

- Ecosocialism: legacy, prospects, challenges

- Transnational feminism, social reproduction and the question of ‘sustainability’

- The gender, class, and racial politics of global environmentalism

- Does nature even exist? Technologies and ideologies of de/acceleration and de/alienation in relation to Marxist-feminism

- The common: can a political principle save the Earth?

- Ending capitalism: Communism as real feminism?

- BirthStrikes and reproductive technologies

In order to be included in the stream, abstracts and panel proposals should explicitly mention the Marxist-Feminist Stream. Panel proposals should include names and abstracts of all panel participants.

Please Note: Although we welcome preconstituted panels, after extensive feedback from previous years we are tightening up on panels with just titles or incomplete names. Panels should provide title, abstract and full names, emails of each participant and abstract/note of contribution (where relevant). Incomplete panel proposals will be put on the reserve list and may ultimately be rejected. We also reserve the right to reject certain papers in a preconstituted panel and to reconstitute panels as we see fit.

DEADLINE EXTENDED: 1 JUNE 2019 at midnight GMT

For all queries, email only please: historicalmaterialism@soas.ac.uk

For the other call for papers and further details about the conference, please go here.

To submit a paper, go here.