Conférence internationale : Tropical Forests (Metric, Technics, Power, Money)

A strategic carbon sinks and stocks, biodiversity hotspots and iconic objects of global environmental stewardship, tropical forests have become crucial sites of intense technoscientific investment and experimentation in recent decades. Today, as new methods are devised to monitor and curb deforestation, measure carbon stocks, and finance biodiversity conservation, tropical forests increasingly concentrate financial, technological, and intellectual resources. Yet, paradoxically, these efforts unfold amid intensifying threats — infrastructural development, agricultural expansion, land speculation, organized crime, mining, violence, and changing climate conditions — that continue to endanger their very survival.

This workshop brings together a diverse group of STS scholars working on the politics and knowledge practices associated with tropical forests in various regions of the world. Our goal is to share our perspectives, research questions and theoretical commitments in order to examine to what extent the idea of “tropical forest” emerges as a global signifier agglomerating distinctive modes of governance, statecraft and knowledge-making. In such a way, we aim to explore the commonalities and differences that articulate tropical forests as a distinctive kind of technopolitical object today.

Comité d’organisation : Nassima Abdelghafour (IRD–SENS); Mady Barbeitas (CNRS–LISIS); Véra Ehrenstein (CNRS–CEMS); James Christopher Mizes (IRD–Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne); Eduardo Romero Dianderas (McGill University)

Financements : FORESTT-HUB (ANR-24-PEFO-0002), ERC InsubordinateFINANCE (Staring Grant N° 101219172), Transatlantic Research Partnership–a program of Albertine Foundation and the French Embassy in the United States