[News] Reminder: RGS Call "Lost in Post-Fossil Transfomations"

[Jan Stanislaw Winkler]

Dear colleagues,

With the usual apologies for cross-posting, please find below our second
reminder of our call for papers for a session titled
'Lost in Post-Fossil Transformations’ at the RGS-IGB Annual
International Conference 2026 (1st – 4th September 2026). The session
adresses experiences, politics and practices of loss, farewell or
letting-go in the context of socio-ecological, postfossil
transformations.

To submit, please send your paper title and abstract (of up to 250
words) to Amy Walker (amy.walker at geo.uni-halle.de
[amy.walker at geo.uni-halle.de]) and Jan Winkler
(jan.winkler at geo.uni-halle.de [jan.winkler at geo.uni-halle.de]) by the
13th February
2026. The session will follow the classic paper format (single paper
presentations of approx. 15 minutes, in-person only). Do get
in touch with any other questions.

Best Wishes,
Amy and Jan

Session Organisers: Amy Walker and Jan Winkler (Martin-Luther University
Halle-Wittenberg; Just Transition Center, JTC)


Lost in Post-Fossil Transformations

Socio-ecological transformations towards more sustainable, post-fossil,
and just societies currently unfold through contentious
and ongoing negotiations. Transformation is never only about turning
towards something new; it also entails turning away from
established practices, infrastructures, and ways of life. The escalating
climate crisis and associated phase-outs and policy
shifts foreground processes of disappearance, in which certain domains
must be dismantled or discontinued. In this sense,
transformation produces experiential forms of loss (Reckwitz 2024) and
creates the conditions for emerging societal modes of
farewell, letting go, or dealing with “transition pain” (Bogner et al.
2024). Developing further debates on emotional dimensions
of sustainability transitions, this session focuses on how practices,
affects, politics, and spaces of loss are implicated in
transformative contexts, shaping socio-political relations and future
pathways.

Loss has been discussed in geography, for example in relation to
ecological loss and damage in a climate-changed world (Cunsolo &
Landmann 2017; Hepach & Hertz 2023), as well as in studies of
deindustrialisation, ruination, and vacancy (Meier 2012; Rohse et
al. 2020; Zhang 2024). Only very recently have the first explicit
attempts been formulated to conceptualize the “geographies of
loss” (Runkel & Schramm 2024). To delimit an otherwise broad field, the
session focuses on current socio-ecological
transformations, including sustainability transitions, climate policies,
and shifts away from fossil-based ways of being. At the
same time, it approaches transformation more broadly as a situated and
lived experience, and therefore resists tying
transformation-related losses too narrowly to fixed objects or dominant
narratives such as deindustrialisation or ecological
collapse. Instead, the session foregrounds loss as dispersed, unevenly
materialising, and socially differentiated, emerging within
wider societal shifts and power relations. Contributions may explore how
loss accompanies transformation from the
outset—anticipated when change is envisioned or engineered, reactivated
through past experiences, or expressed as mourning for
futures that never materialised.

Against the backdrop of dominant narratives of progress, spaces for
collective engagement with loss are often limited (Elliott
2018; Reckwitz 2024). This session therefore asks how practices and
spaces of loss might enable social participation in
transformation, and whether engaging with loss can open ethical and
political perspectives for shaping just transitions. Loss
raises difficult questions about the legitimacy of holding on and about
how politically problematic sentiments—such as claims that
“things were better before”—can be addressed without slipping into
nostalgic or reactionary positions, or arguing about the moral
order of societal ‘losers’ and what legitimacy groups have for trying to
“hold on”. Yet if loone-sided logics of progress, or as a critique of sustainability’s
tendency toward preservation (rather than toward exploring
progressive forms of letting go; Elliott 2018), we invite contributions
that explore how the perspective of loss might be
mobilised in critical and progressive ways.

We invite theoretical, empirical, and methodological interventions
addressing questions such as:

•What are societal modes of (doing) loss, beyond the domains of death,
funeral, and established forms of mourning? Through what
practices is a fossil life mourned?
•How can we conceive of the political, ethical, and analytical potential
of loss? Do related practices of bidding farewell,
letting go (Bogner et al. 2024) or mourning (Cunsolo and Landmann 2017)
help us understand loss as a shared and affective
practice?
•Who decides what is mournable loss? Who has the capacity to ‘let go’,
and who does not? What are the uneven ecologies of loss?
What are the ethics of these power dynamics and efforts to label
attachments as cruel optimisms or backwards-looking (Berlant
2011)?
•What can be more-than-human perspectives on loss (Moulton 2021;
Tschakert et. al 2023; Phillips et al. 2023)? Besides ecological
losses: can we – or should we – also mourn closing power plants,
industrial infrastructures, and fossil machines?
•How do subjects deal with loss? What are the practices and relational
spaces of consolation and processing loss (Jedan, Maddrell
and Venbrux 2019)?
•Is there a spatial discharge (Anderson 2009) of loss, grief and
consolation? What spatial configurations – couplings/decouplings,
connections/separations, gaps, fractures – constitute what kind of
losses (for whom) – and what capacities to process them
(Maddrell 2016; Griffiths 2021; Rohse et al. 2020; Zhang 2024)? To what
extend do intersecting layers of loss influence
perceptions and practices of transformation?
•What socio-spatial relations shape the ability to (re-)connect the
disconnected, reconcile the fractured, or re-orient
disappearance? How might this spatial perspective contribute to a
politics of loss within just transitions?

References
Anderson, B. (2009). Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society,
2, 77–81.
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bogner, K., Kump, B., Beekman, M., Wittmayer, J. (2024). Coping with
transition pain: An emotions perspective on phase-outs in
sustainability transitions. Environmental Innovation and Societal
Transitions, 50, 100806
Cunsolo, Ashlee & Landman, Karen (Ed.). (2017). Mourning Nature. Hope at
the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief. Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Elliott, R. (2018). The sociology of climate change as a sociology of
loss. European Journal of Sociology, 69(3), 301–337.
Griffiths, H. M. (2021). Enacting memory and grief in poetic landscapes.
Emotion, Space and Society, 41, 100822.
Hepach, A. & Hartz, F. (2023). What is lost from climate change?
Phenomenology at the “limits to adaptation”. Geographica
Helvetica, 78, 211–221.
Jedan, C., Maddrell, A. & Venbrux, E. (Ed.). (2020). Consolationscapes
in the Face of Loss. Grief and Consolation in Space and
Time. Abingdon.
Maddrell, A. (2016). Mapping grief: A conceptual framework for
understanding the spatial dimensions of bereavement, mourning and
remembrance. Social & Cultural Geography, 17(2), 166–188.
Meier, L. (2012). Encounters with haunted industrial workplaces and
emotions of loss: Class-related senses of place within the
memories of metalworkers. Cultural Geographies, 20(4), 467–483.
Moulton, J. V. (2021). The matter of mapping multispecies entanglements
of mourning—A manifesto’s shout, an orca’s tour of grief.
Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 2(1), 99–119.
Phillips, C., Atchison, J. & Straughan, E. (2023). The power of lament:
Reckoning with loss in an urban forest. Environment and
Planning E: Nature and Space, 6(4), 2358–2378.
Reckwitz, A. (2024). Verlust – Ein Grundproblem Rohse, M., Day, R. & Llewellyn, D. (2020). Towards an emotional energy
geography. Geoforum, 110, 136–146.
Runkel, S. & Schramm, M. (2024- ongoing): Special Issue “Geographien des
Verlusts“. Geographica
Helvetica. https://gh.copernicus.org/articles/special_issue1303.html,
[https://gh.copernicus.org/articles/special_issue1303.html,] 22.01.26
Tschakert, P., du Coudray, C. & Horwitz, P. (2023). Walking journeys
into everyday climatic-affective atmospheres. Environment and
Planning E: Nature and Space, 2023, 1–23.
Zhang, V. (2024). Embodying industrial transitions: Melancholy loss,
interrupted habit and transitional memory after the end of a
coal mine. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 50(2),
1–15.
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