The Shadow Places Network: collaboration to re-imagine and co-produce connections for justice in an era of climate change

The Shadow Places Network of scholars, artists and activists will collaborate through a series of real and virtual encounters to document, co-produce and reimagine connections between places and peoples in an era of climate change. The network will make visible the place-based, material and imaginative structures, practices and relations that sustain the exploitative capitalist system, and the modern global history of colonisation, that underpin climate change. These structures, practices and relations actively construct a geography of injustice constituted of multiple shadow places. Simultaneously the network will seek to document and reimagine more just and ethical connections and understandings of place. The Shadow Places Network will enable opportunities for transnational, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary collaborations, and for the inclusion of a wide range of participants (academic and non-academic) committed to environmental justice and to find new ways of imagining, organising and practicing collaborative enquiry and environmental activism. The network is inspired by Australian feminist and eco-philosopher Val Plumwood, whose powerful and poetic concept of shadow places (2008) offered a framework for constellating questions of capitalist exploitation, colonial legacies, social justice and environmental futures in a materially grounded context of place.