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Wageningen University | PhD Workshop: SMART Political Ecologies? On the Nature and Power of Environmental Technologies and their Implications for Just Futures (4 ECTS)

The Six-day intensive PhD workshop ‘SMART Political Ecologies? On the Nature and Power of Environmental Technologies and their Implications for Just Futures’ will be held from 27 June – 3 July 2019 in Wageningen, the Netherlands.
The workshop gives motivated PhD candidates the chance to deepen their knowledge on how the field of political ecology is adapting to the contemporary era of multiplying, intensifying and proliferating environmental technologies. On the one hand, this refers to governmental technologies in the Foucauldian sense, where new techniques, politics and forms of governmental oversight, intervention and management are rapidly changing human-nature relations and access to and control over nonhuman natures. On the other hand, we have seen the rapid emergence of a host of new technologies in the material sense, driven by the Internet-of-Things, new SMART technologies, and social media platforms, among others. These technological developments and their integrated possibilities are further changing environmental governance and politics around the planet. Environmental studies and political ecology scholars have started to register these developments yet have only begun to investigate and understand their implications. The 2019 Wageningen Political Ecology Summer school focuses on these two sides of ‘environmental technologies’ and welcomes PhD candidates to join a great line-up of speakers to discuss their implications for political ecology and just futures.