The Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC) and Nottingham Trent University’s Climate Justice Hub, in collaboration with the ICON•S Interest Group on Climate Change and Migration and the ESIL Interest Group on Migration and Refugee Law, will be hosting a seminar on ‘Climate Change and Migration: New Challenges, Legal Responses, and Policy Solutions’ that will take place in person on 19 June 2024 in Nottingham.
The seminar, sponsored by the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA), aims to create a forum for UK-based researchers, practitioners, and scholars from various disciplines interested in the pressing issue of climate-related human (im)mobility to discuss their work and foster opportunities for collaborative research. Selected participants will take part in small group workshops where they will provide a short presentation followed by a discussion. Draft papers and materials will be circulated in advance to each group to ensure in-depth engagement, and we aim to involve experts in the field as well as representatives of civil society organisations working with refugees and people with lived experience of displacement.
We invite submissions from researchers, practitioners, and scholars of any background and at any stage of their career. PhD candidates, early career researchers, and researchers with lived experience of displacement are particularly welcome. The seminar aims to put in conversation socio-legal experts to re-humanise and re-historicise climate change effects and forced mobilities to evaluate existing responses to climate-induced migration and discuss how to better equip future ones. For this reason, we invite abstracts from researchers from various areas of law (including human rights, environmental law, asylum and refugee law, and other areas of migration law), sociology, anthropology, political philosophy, economics, and other social sciences disciplines. Potential topics for submission include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Legal and policy responses to climate-related human mobility in a comparative lens
- The UK government initiative on climate-related in-migration
- Building resilience versus resettlement policies
- Community-based solutions and bottom-up approaches
- Climate (il)literacy and human mobility
- The application of non-refoulement to “climate displacees”
- Mobilities and im-mobilities
- Intersection of human mobility and the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment; the rights of nature; environmental protection through criminal law; loss and damage; or climate justice
- Feminist, Queer, Indigenous, TWAIL, post/de-colonial, non-Western perspectives to climate-related displacement
Submission guidelines
Those interested in presenting should submit an abstract of no more than 400 words on their proposed presentation by 12 April 2024. Abstracts should be submitted via this Application Form.
Selected participants will be requested to submit a full draft paper of maximum 3,000 words by 7 June 2024. Participants are encouraged (but not expected) to prepare posters and other visual materials to showcase their research.
We also welcome expressions of interest from civil society organisations working with refugees and people with lived experience of displacement who would be interested in sharing their work in any form, including presentations, videos, storytelling, and more.
Funding
We are able to offer a limited number of travel bursaries to support the attendance of participants without institutional funding, kindly provided by the SLSA 2024 Seminar Competition Award. If you wish to be considered for a travel bursary, please include on your Application Form: (1) a cost estimation for travel to Nottingham from within the UK, and (2) a personal statement or a statement by your institution(s) explaining that you do not have access to other funding to cover your expenses.
Download the Call for Abstracts (PDF)