Closing Plenary at The World-Ecology Research Network

In early June ’22 I gave the closing plenary at the World-Ecology Research Network conference in Bonn, Germany. I presented the Ruderal Witchcraft Manifesto, the ongoing collaborative writing and interventionist art project co-produced with Oliver Kellhammer. An introduction to this work will be published in The Witch Studies Reader, edited by Soma Chaudury and Jane Ward, and out through Duke University Press early next year.

“Through Working Environments, Unruly Natures, the 2022 meeting of the World-Ecology Research Network speaks to the work/life nexus of planetary justice. Highlighted by recent calls for a Green New Deal and Degrowth, we will explore the intimately connected – and profoundly global – dimensions of work, workers, and life across the long history of the capitalist world-ecology. Recognizing the dialectic of productive and reproductive work as the pivot of modern environment-making and class formation, [WERN invited] paper and session proposals that unpack the connective relations between work, working bodies, and working environments – past, present, and future. [WERN situated] capitalism’s mobilization of paid and unpaid work in their racialized, gendered, colonial, and multi-species moments. This includes the deep history of labor politics, working class protest, and social revolution in their connections with world-ecological crises and capitalist restructuring. Identifying the strategic relations between neoliberal dispossession, proliferating climate disasters, and widening indequality, Working Environments, Unruly Natures pursues new syntheses, narratives, and conceptualizations of twenty-first century crisis that can inform the emergent politics of planetary justice.”