CENTERING COMMUNITY

The Center for Integrative Conservation Research at the University of Georgia announces the call for submissions for the 2026 Integrative Conservation Conference (ICC), which will take place in Athens, Georgia, February 27-28, 2026, with hybrid options. Since the inaugural conference in 2018, ICC has provided a place for collective learning and collaboration, bringing students, researchers, and practitioners together to share their work with each other.

With this year’s theme of “Centering Community,” we hope to foster spaces where we can engage with the varied human, more-than-human, and beyond-human communities – communities of people, plants, wildlife, fungi, microbes, and beyond. We also hope to foster dialogue across natural and social sciences, humanities, and the arts, highlighting interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and antidisciplinary approaches to conservation and environmental research. We welcome proposals for organized sessions, as well as presentations, posters, and non-traditional creative contributions.

Call for sessions and abstracts is open until Monday, November 17, 2025

Notification of acceptance by Friday, December 12, 2025

Submit abstracts here

Submit session proposals here

Centering Community

For the upcoming iteration of ICC, we would like to engage with how human, ecological, and beyond-human communities can be centered in our work, and the diverse ways in which this is already being practiced.

Over the past three decades, community-centered environmental research and practice have made significant strides across disciplines, particularly under Indigenous and feminist ecologies; complexity and complex adaptive systems; assemblages, emergence, and self organization; collaborative and participatory research; more-than-human research; relational, spatial, or temporal approaches, and beyond. This work encompasses a vast array of communities, and we would like to engage with dialogs that represent this diversity –

From peoples’ relationships with communities of microbes

That can be spread by communities of ticks

To communities of livestock or megafauna or insects,

Whose lives are intricately entangled with communities of farmers

On communities of people who have communities of plants in their gardens

To communities of bees and wasps found in communities of crops

About communities of birds observed by communities of birders

To communities of bacteria in the gut microbiomes of humans

From communities of scholars co-building community-led coalitions

To the communities we form at work, at home, through art, or in the academy

For ICC 2026, we welcome your interpretations of “Centering Community”!

- As we engage with these foundations, focus areas, and progressive developments during ICC, we would like to collectively reflect on –
- How do we conceptualize the concept of ‘community’?
- What makes a ‘community’ – humans, plants, wildlife, microbes, others? What defines it?
- Who are the communities our work centers?
- Which communities remain at the margins?
- How do these communities shape the work we do?
- How can we revisit the concept and process of ‘research’ from community-centered perspectives?
- In what ways do our roles and positions shift as we center communities?

Guidelines for Presentations and Posters

Oral presentations can be in four forms: Talks (12-minute presentation with 3 minutes for Q&A), Speed Talks (5-minute presentation, 15 minutes at the end for Q&A for all presenters), microtalks or PechaKucha (10 slides of 10 seconds each, 15 minutes at the end for Q&A for all presenters), and Posters.
We welcome innovative methods of presenting, including storytelling, poetry/spoken word, or music within all session types.
Please indicate one type of presentation per 200-word abstract submitted; you may submit more than one submission of different presentation types or abstracts. Depending on the program, we may ask you to consider a different presentation type.
Posters should be a maximum size of 36 inches x 48 inches. They may be in landscape or portrait orientation. Presenters are required to print their own posters prior to the conference. Push pins, tape, and easels will be provided for hanging up the posters at the venue.
PechaKucha is envisioned as innovative, micro-talks with an audio-visual focus (and less text). Talks may be about proposed studies, fascinating new topics, community works, etc. that better suit the micro-style of presentation.

Submit presentation and poster abstracts here.

Guidelines for Sessions

Sessions will be up to 75 minutes in length.
Oral presentations may be composed of either four Talks (15-minute presentations) or twelve Speed Talks (5-minute presentations).

A session may consist of creative format, traditional format talks, or a mix of both.

Workshop sessions will be conducted on Friday, February 27th, the first day of the conference. Workshops are envisioned as an interactive educational session. Facilitators can choose the preferred minimum and maximum number of participants.
Panel sessions will feature a discussion/Q&A between 3-5 experts or community members on a particular topic.
Roundtable sessions are open, collaborative discussions on a specific topic or question, with a clear goal or intended outcome. For example, a declaration, white paper, or report.
Please indicate one type of organized session per 200-word abstract submitted.
Facilitators of accepted sessions will assist conference organizers in reviewing abstracts for their session.

Submit organized session abstracts here.

Registration Rates

Registration Rates	Student Registration	Non-students (Faculty, professionals)
Early Bird Registration EOD Friday, Jan. 30	$30	$80
Late Registration	$50	$100
Online only (US)	$20	$35
Online only (Non-US countries)	$10	$15

Registration will open soon. All registration closes on Wednesday, February 25, 2026.

We have limited discounted registration rates for those experiencing financial hardships and community advocates. Please email icc-cicr@uga.edu if this applies to you.

Reflections on the banner artwork, “Communities of Fluidity” by Aharna Sarkar

What is a better representation of interconnectedness and plurality than water?

I particularly view the world with this lens perhaps because my research centers alpine streams and communities that are in flux with these streams – always in making and mutual shaping. This image, conceived for ICC 2026 focusing on ‘Centering Community’, tries to incorporate more communities and land/waterscapes – from alpine forests to gently rolling hills with hardwood trees, terrace farming, rice farming, mining industries, (univer)cities and mangrove wetlands. It follows a stream from its glacial origins to its numerous interactions with different landscapes, alongside communities and assemblages of fishes, farmers, trees, industrialists, and cities. These communities perceive and relate to water in diverse ways, yet they are unified in their reliance on water. Communities that acknowledge and appreciate their relationalities with water understand its ephemeral nature, dynamism, and respond to changes informed by those insights. Research may render some of these responses in communities visible, but much remains untranslated and unresolved. Moreover, no visual representation anyone creates can wholly represent the complexity of water-entangled communities. Defining these communities and entanglements seems more a process, rather than a step with a specific outcome. That is what especially excites me about Centering Community at ICC 2026.

What happens when people from diverse communities and perspectives come together to talk about communities?

What other communities can we add to this art?

What would this art look like if someone else had made it?

What connections and insights can visual art allow that a text-based reflection may not be able to do?

How can we improve our relations with the communities we are entangled in through our work, through our practice, through our art?

Select References and Resources

Indigenous and Feminist Ecologies

Cajete, G. (2000). Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (1st Edition). Clear Light Publishers. link

Salmón, E. (2000). Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions Of The Human–Nature Relationship. Ecological Applications, 10(5), 1327–1332. link

Birke, L., Bryld, M., & Lykke, N. (2004). Animal Performances: An Exploration of Intersections between Feminist Science Studies and Studies of Human/Animal Relationships. Feminist Theory, 5(2), 167–183. link

Benson, K., & Nagar, R. (2006). Collaboration as Resistance? Reconsidering the processes, products, and possibilities of feminist oral history and ethnography. Gender, Place & Culture, 13(5), 581–592. link

Watson, A., & Huntington, O. H. (2008). They’re here – I can feel them: The epistemic spaces of Indigenous and Western Knowledges. Social & Cultural Geography, 9(3), 257–281. link

Kassam, K.-A. (2009). Viewing Change Through the Prism of Indigenous Human Ecology: Findings from the Afghan and Tajik Pamirs. Human Ecology, 37(6), 677–690. link

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (1st Edition). Milkweed Editions. link

Reo, N. J., & Parker, A. K. (2013). Re-thinking colonialism to prepare for the impacts of rapid environmental change. In Maldonado, J.K., Pandya, R., & Colombi, B. (Eds.), Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples in the United States—Impacts, Experiences, and Actions (pp. 163–174). Springer. link

Whyte, K. P. (2013). On the role of traditional ecological knowledge as a collaborative concept: A philosophical study. Ecological Processes, 2(1), 7. link

Reyes-García, V., Paneque-Gálvez, J., Bottazzi, P., Luz, A. C., Gueze, M., Macía, M. J., Orta-Martínez, M., & Pacheco, P. (2014). Indigenous land reconfiguration and fragmented institutions: A historical political ecology of Tsimane’ lands (Bolivian Amazon). Journal of Rural Studies, 34, 282–291. link

Singh, N. (2018). Introduction: Affective Ecologies and Conservation. Conservation and Society, 16(1), 1. link

Todd, Z. (2018). Refracting the State Through Human-Fish Relations: Fishing, Indigenous Legal Orders and Colonialism in North/Western Canada. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 7(1), 60–75. link

Shokirov, Q., & Backhaus, N. (2020). Integrating hunter knowledge with community-based conservation in the Pamir Region of Tajikistan. Ecology and Society, 25(1), art1. link

Araos, F., Anbleyth-Evans, J., Riquelme, W., Hidalgo, C., Brañas, F., Catalán, E., Núñez, D., & Diestre, F. (2020). Marine Indigenous Areas: Conservation Assemblages for Sustainability in Southern Chile. Coastal Management, 48(4), 289–307. link

Kozhisseri, D., & Rajan, S. (2020). Unfolding nomadism? A feminist political ecology of sedentarization in the Attappady Hills, Kerala. Journal of Political Ecology, 27(1). link

Dow, K., & Lamoreaux, J. (2020). Situated Kinmaking and the Population “Problem.” Environmental Humanities, 12(2), 475–491. link

Chao, S. (2021). The Beetle or the Bug? Multispecies Politics in a West Papuan Oil Palm Plantation. American Anthropologist, 123(3), 476–489. link

Ismare Peña, R., Carpio Opua, C., Cheucarama Membache, D., Grin, F., Membora Peña, D., Peña Ismare, C., & Velásquez Runk, J. (2021). Wounaan Storying as Intervention: Storywork in the Crafting of a Multimodal Illustrated Story Book on People and Birds. Genealogy, 5(4), 91. link

Mollett, S. (2021). Hemispheric, Relational, and Intersectional Political Ecologies of Race: Centring Land‐Body Entanglements in the Americas. Antipode, 53(3), 810–830. Link

Mustafa, D., Nyaupane, G., Shrestha, K., Buzinde, C., Thanet, D. R., & Vandever, V. (2021). Scalar politics of Indigenous waterscapes in Navajo Nation and Nepal: Conflict, conservation and development. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 251484862110078. link

Lamb, C.T., Willson, R., Richter, C., Owens-Beek, N., Napoleon, J., Muir, B., Scott McNay, R., Lavis, E., Hebblewhite, M., Giguere, L., Dokkie, T., Boutin, S., Ford, A.T. (2022). Indigenous-led conservation: Pathways to recovery for the nearly extirpated Klinse-Za mountain caribou. Ecological Applications, 32:e2581. link

Ojeda, D., Nirmal, P., Rocheleau, D., & Emel, J. (2022). Feminist Ecologies. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 47, 149–171. link

Wehi, P. M., Kamelamela, K. L., Whyte, K., Watene, K., & Reo, N. (2023). Contribution of Indigenous Peoples’ understandings and relational frameworks to invasive alien species management. People and Nature, 5(5), 1403–1414. link

Complexity and Complex Adaptive Systems

Abel, T. (1998). Complex Adaptive Systems, Evolutionism, and Ecology within Anthropology: Interdisciplinary Research for Understanding Cultural and Ecological Dynamics. Journal of Ecological Anthropology, 2(1), 6–29. link

Lansing, J. S. (2003). Complex Adaptive Systems. Annual Review of Anthropology, 32(1), 183–204. link

Berkes, F. (2004). Rethinking Community-Based Conservation. Conservation Biology, 18(3), 621–630. link

Holling, C. S. (2004). From Complex Regions to Complex Worlds. Ecology and Society, 9(1), art11. link

Liu, J., Dietz, T., Carpenter, S. R., Alberti, M., Folke, C., Moran, E., Pell, A. N., Deadman, P., Kratz, T., Lubchenco, J., Ostrom, E., Ouyang, Z., Provencher, W., Redman, C. L., Schneider, S. H., & Taylor, W. W. (2007). Complexity of Coupled Human and Natural Systems. Science, 317(5844), 1513–1516. link

Sneddon, C. (2007). Nature’s Materiality and the Circuitous Paths of Accumulation: Dispossession of Freshwater Fisheries in Cambodia. Antipode, 39(1), 167–193. link

Spangenberg, J. H., & Settele, J. (2010). Precisely incorrect? Monetising the value of ecosystem services. Ecological Complexity, 7(3), 327–337. link

Levin, S., Xepapadeas, T., Crépin, A.-S., Norberg, J., De Zeeuw, A., Folke, C., Hughes, T., Arrow, K., Barrett, S., Daily, G., Ehrlich, P., Kautsky, N., Mäler, K.-G., Polasky, S., Troell, M., Vincent, J. R., & Walker, B. (2013). Social-ecological systems as complex adaptive systems: Modeling and policy implications. Environment and Development Economics, 18(2), 111–132. link

McHale, M., Pickett, S., Barbosa, O., Bunn, D., Cadenasso, M., Childers, D., Gartin, M., Hess, G., Iwaniec, D., McPhearson, T., Peterson, M., Poole, A., Rivers, L., Shutters, S., & Zhou, W. (2015). The New Global Urban Realm: Complex, Connected, Diffuse, and Diverse Social-Ecological Systems. Sustainability, 7(5), 5211–5240. Link

Messier, C., Puettmann, K., Chazdon, R., Andersson, K. P., Angers, V. A., Brotons, L., Filotas, E., Tittler, R., Parrott, L., & Levin, S. A. (2015). From Management to Stewardship: Viewing Forests As Complex Adaptive Systems in an Uncertain World: From management to stewardship. Conservation Letters, 8(5), 368–377. link

Peipoch, M., Brauns, M., Hauer, F. R., Weitere, M., & Valett, H. M. (2015). Ecological Simplification: Human Influences on Riverscape Complexity. BioScience, 65(11), 1057–1065. link

Briassoulis, H. (2017). Response assemblages and their socioecological fit: Conceptualizing human responses to environmental degradation. Dialogues in Human Geography, 7(2), 166–185. link

DeFries, R., & Nagendra, H. (2017). Ecosystem management as a wicked problem. Science, 356(6335), 265–270. link

Pérez-Llorente, I., Ramírez, M. I., Paneque-Gálvez, J., Garibay Orozco, C., & González-López, R. (2019). Unraveling complex relations between forest-cover change and conflicts through spatial and relational analyses. Ecology and Society, 24(3), art3. link

Naylor, A., Ford, J., Pearce, T., & Van Alstine, J. (2020). Conceptualizing Climate Vulnerability in Complex Adaptive Systems. One Earth, 2(5), 444–454. link

Spies, M., & Alff, H. (2020). Assemblages and complex adaptive systems: A conceptual crossroads for integrative research? Geography Compass, 14(10). link

Yu, D. J., Haeffner, M., Jeong, H., Pande, S., Dame, J., Di Baldassarre, G., Garcia-Santos, G., Hermans, L., Muneepeerakul, R., Nardi, F., Sanderson, M. R., Tian, F., Wei, Y., Wessels, J., & Sivapalan, M. (2022). On capturing human agency and methodological interdisciplinarity in socio-hydrology research. Hydrological Sciences Journal, 67(13), 1905–1916. link

Assemblages, Emergence, and Self Organization

Watson, A., & Huntington, O. H. (2008). They’re here – I can feel them: The epistemic spaces of Indigenous and Western Knowledges. Social & Cultural Geography, 9(3), 257–281. link

Ogden, L., Heynen, N., Oslender, U., West, P., Kassam, K.-A., & Robbins, P. (2013). Global assemblages, resilience, and Earth Stewardship in the Anthropocene. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 11(7), 341–347. link

Aisher, A., & Damodaran, V. (2016). Introduction: Human-nature interactions through a multispecies lens. Conservation and Society, 14(4), 293. link

Briassoulis, H. (2017). Response assemblages and their socioecological fit: Conceptualizing human responses to environmental degradation. Dialogues in Human Geography, 7(2), 166–185. link

Lejano, R. P. (2017). Assemblage and relationality in social-ecological systems. Dialogues in Human Geography, 7(2), 192–196. link

Murray, J. (2018). Placing the Animal in the Dialogue Between Law and Ecology. Liverpool Law Review, 39(1–2), 9–27. link

Singh, N. (2018). Introduction: Affective Ecologies and Conservation. Conservation and Society, 16(1), 1. link

Chowdhury, A. R., & Lahiri-Dutt, K. (2019). Hirashasan: Governing diamonds in Central India. Geoforum, 105, 32–42. link

Amoako, C., & Frimpong Boamah, E. (2020). Becoming Vulnerable to Flooding: An Urban Assemblage View of Flooding in an African City. Planning Theory & Practice, 21(3), 371–391. link

Grove, K., Cox, S., & Barnett, A. (2020). Racializing Resilience: Assemblage, Critique, and Contested Futures in Greater Miami Resilience Planning. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 110(5), 1613–1630. link

Spies, M., & Alff, H. (2020). Assemblages and complex adaptive systems: A conceptual crossroads for integrative research? Geography Compass, 14(10). link

Tozzi, A. (2021). An approach to pluralizing socionatural resilience through assemblages. Progress in Human Geography, 45(5), 1083–1104. link

Collaborative and Participatory Research

Cahill, C., Sultana, F., & Pain, Rachel. (2007). Participatory Ethics: Politics, Practices, Institutions. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 6(3), 304–318. link

Gallardo, J. H., & Stein, T. V. (2007). Participation, Power and Racial Representation: Negotiating Nature-Based and Heritage Tourism Development in the Rural South. Society & Natural Resources, 20(7), 597–611. link

Fernandez-Gimenez, M. E., Ballard, H. L., & Sturtevant, V. E. (2008). Adaptive Management and Social Learning in Collaborative and Community-Based Monitoring: A Study of Five Community-Based Forestry Organizations in the western USA. Ecology and Society, 13(2)(4), 22. link

Roth, R. (2009). The challenges of mapping complex indigenous spatiality: From abstract space to dwelling space. Cultural Geographies, 16(2), 207–227. link

Whyte, K. P. (2013). On the role of traditional ecological knowledge as a collaborative concept: A philosophical study. Ecological Processes, 2(1), 7. link

Velasquez Runk, J. (2014). Enriching indigenous knowledge scholarship via collaborative methodologies: Beyond the high tide’s few hours. Ecology and Society, 19(4), art37. link

Breen, J., Dosemagen, Shannon, Warren, Jeffrey, & Lippincott, Mathew. (2015). Mapping Grassroots: Geodata and the structure of community-led open environmental science. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 14(3), 849–873. link

Bastian, M., Jones, O., Moore, N., & Roe, E. (Eds.). (2016). Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds. Routledge. link

Noorani, T., & Brigstocke, J. (2018). More-Than-Human Participatory Research (K. Facer & K. Dunleavy, Eds.). University of Bristol and the AHRC Connected Communities Programme. link

Nyantakyi-Frimpong, H. (2019). Visualizing politics: A feminist political ecology and participatory GIS approach to understanding smallholder farming, climate change vulnerability, and seed bank failures in Northern Ghana. Geoforum, 105, 109–121. link

Godden, N. J., Macnish, P., Chakma, T., & Naidu, K. (2020). Feminist Participatory Action Research as a tool for climate justice. Gender & Development, 28(3), 593–615. link

Montenegro de Wit, M., Shattuck, A., Iles, A., Graddy-Lovelace, G., Roman-Alcalá, A., & Chappell, M. (2021). Operating principles for collective scholar-activism: Early insights from the Agroecology Research-Action Collective. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 1–19. link

Facchinelli, F., Pappalardo, S. E., Della Fera, G., Crescini, E., Codato, D., Diantini, A., Moncayo Jimenez, D. R., Fajardo Mendoza, P. E., Bignante, E., & De Marchi, M. (2022). Extreme citizens science for climate justice: Linking pixel to people for mapping gas flaring in Amazon rainforest. Environmental Research Letters, 17(2), 024003. link

More-than-Human Research

Gibbs, L. M. (2009). Water Places: Cultural, Social and More-Than-Human Geographies of Nature. Scottish Geographical Journal, 125(3–4), 361–369. link

Poe, M. R., LeCompte, J., McLain, R., & Hurley, P. (2014). Urban foraging and the relational ecologies of belonging. Social & Cultural Geography, 15(8), 901–919. link

Skandrani, Z., Lepetz, S., & Prévot-Julliard, A.-C. (2014). Nuisance species: Beyond the ecological perspective. Ecological Processes, 3(1), 3. link

Aisher, A., & Damodaran, V. (2016). Introduction: Human-nature interactions through a multispecies lens. Conservation and Society, 14(4), 293. link

Srinivasan, K., & Kasturirangan, R. (2016). Political ecology, development, and human exceptionalism. Geoforum, 75, 125–128. link

Bastian, M., Jones, O., Moore, N., & Roe, E. (Eds.). (2016). Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds. Routledge. link

Noorani, T., & Brigstocke, J. (2018). More-Than-Human Participatory Research (K. Facer & K. Dunleavy, Eds.). University of Bristol and the AHRC Connected Communities Programme. link

Nieto-Romero, M., Valente, S., Figueiredo, E., & Parra, C. (2019). Historical commons as sites of transformation. A critical research agenda to study human and more-than-human communities. Geoforum, 107, 113–123. link

Chao, S. (2021). The Beetle or the Bug? Multispecies Politics in a West Papuan Oil Palm Plantation. American Anthropologist, 123(3), 476–489. link

Celermajer, D., Schlosberg, D., Rickards, L., Stewart-Harawira, M., Thaler, M., Tschakert, P., Verlie, B., & Winter, C. (2021). Multispecies justice: Theories, challenges, and a research agenda for environmental politics. Environmental Politics, 30(1–2), 119–140. link

Neumann, R. P. (2022). Tracing the historical agency of wild animals in the archives: Methodology and multidisciplinarity in posthumanist political ecology. Geoforum, 135, 71–81. link

Srinivasan, K. (2022). Re-animalising wellbeing: Multispecies justice after development. The Sociological Review, 70(2), 352–366. link

Tschakert, P. (2022). More-than-human solidarity and multispecies justice in the climate crisis. Environmental Politics, 31(2), 277–296. link

Winter, C. J. (2022). Introduction: What’s the value of multispecies justice? Environmental Politics, 31(2), 251–257. link

Relational, Spatial, or Temporal approaches

(Todd 2018, Nyantakyi-Frimpong 2019, Pérez-Llorente et al. 2019, Kozhisseri and Rajan 2020, Dow and Lamoreaux 2020, Mollett 2021, Acolin and Kim 2022)

Cajete, G. (2000). Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (1st Edition). Clear Light Publishers. link

Salmón, E. (2000). Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions Of The Human–Nature Relationship. Ecological Applications, 10(5), 1327–1332. link

Escobar, A. (2001). Culture sits in places: Reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization. Political Geography, 20(2), 139–174. link

Roth, R. (2009). The challenges of mapping complex indigenous spatiality: From abstract space to dwelling space. Cultural Geographies, 16(2), 207–227. link

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (1st Edition). Milkweed Editions. link

Poe, M. R., LeCompte, J., McLain, R., & Hurley, P. (2014). Urban foraging and the relational ecologies of belonging. Social & Cultural Geography, 15(8), 901–919. link

Information on Previous Conferences

CICR has coordinated the Integrative Conservation Conference since 2018; programs from past events are included below:

2018 ICC Program and video of the Composer + Researcher concert

2020 ICC Program

2022 ICC Program

2024 ICC Program

Please contact icc-cicr@uga.edu with any questions.