Call for Papers: American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting 2017

5-10 April, Boston

Beyond “migration as adaptation”: A Translocal Perspective on the Nexus of Migration & Environmental Change

Session organisers:

Patrick Sakdapolrak, University of Vienna
Harald Sterly, University of Bonn

Session description:

This session aims at bringing together scientists working on the threefold nexus of migration and translocality, environmental and climate change, and resilience and adaptation. The emphasis will be on questions, how and to what extent migration and translocal connections can contribute to enhanced resilience and adaptive capacity.

The nexus of migration and environmental & climate change – some of the most important processes of our time – is increasingly becoming the subject of wider scientific and public interest. Much attention is directed to questions regarding the causal attribution of migration to environmental change,; there is however a growing acknowledgement of the complexity of this nexus: migrati­on, environmental (and climate) change and resilience are linked in multi-causal and multi-directional ways. Recently, the perspective on migration is also widening – incorporating not only the process of migration itself, but also the multiple dimensions of translocal connectivity between the migrants, their places of origin and their places of destination, and the question of what happens after people migrate.

This opens up the chance for investigating important questions of high social and political rele­vance, relating for example to the extent and to the mechanisms how migration can contribute to the reduction of vulnerability in general, and to climate change adaptation in particular; or to the conditions and reasons why migration can also have adver­se consequences, in social and ecological terms, and in areas of both origin and destination; or, finally, how climate change and development policy can possibly benefit from an integration of the topic of migration.

We thus call for abstracts for example in the following fields: the relevance of migration (and translocality) for adaptation to climate change; conceptualization and empirical operationa­lization of the relationships of migration, social resilience and climate change adaptation; ways to bridge the divide between social and natural science concepts of resilience; the role of migration in climate change adaptation governance.

We welcome abstracts of both theoretical as well as empirical character. Please send your abstract of 250 words (and, if at hand, your AAG PIN) to Harald Sterly (sterly@giub.uni-bonn.de) and Patrick Sakdapolrak (patrick.sakdapolrak@univie.ac.at) until 25.10.2016.