Call for Papers
(UN)SUSTAINABILITIES
In the context of the global ecological crisis marked by the double challenge of the energy and digital transition, the concept of sustainability has become a hyper-concept. Like other present central concepts that have gained "city rights" in the Social Sciences, the idea of sustainability has migrated from the biological sciences and from an organicist register to the most diverse domains of economic and social life: demography, the management of natural resources and energy systems, scientific and technological development, the production and circulation of goods and services, the organization of territories and local communities, public and private finance and the management models of companies and organizations. Seen from an institutionalist perspective, the concept of sustainability intersects the major present issues and comes from a historical construction, not always perceptible, which is intertwined with the history of capitalism, the cycles of economic development and its crises. Built to answer to social and economic evidence of imbalance between human action and the exploitation of the natural environment, the notion of sustainability points to forms of governance of economic activity that historically include economic ideas, institutions and power relations. Over space and time, the concept of sustainability has had several variations and specificities that refer to its own antinomy - the unsustainabilities. Adopting a critical perspective capable of identifying the historical variety of the forms of sustainability and their geographical varieties opens up the vast field of inequalities, which is now central to the Social Sciences and has a long path in economic and social history. In its XLI Meeting, to be held at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra on 15 and 16 July 2022, APHES proposes an open debate on the themes of sustainability and unsustainability, without prejudice to other thematic approaches related to the central theme of the Meeting. |