Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN20)
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020
Session organizers
Marco Malagoli (Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brasil) and Lúcia Fernandes (Centro de Estudos Sociais, Portugal). Please send abstracts of 250 words or less to marcomalagodi@id.uff.br and luciaof@gmail.com no later than November 21st.
Session description
At the present global context with a new wave of neoliberal violences anchored in democratic crisis, worldwide elites propose once again authoritarism as a consensual value and the solution for the presumed social order, giving support to (neo)colonial geopolitcal reinventions – and their “glocalized” systemical forces. With this background a greater reinvention effort of our research and militant agendas is asked, in order to let us be opened to other connections, subjectivities, knowledges, strategies, praxis, network actions and agencies… to go on in the fight for other social transformative models.
The sociabilities, knowledges, memories, innovations and confrontations promoted by the political ecology (PE) offer relevant pathways to rethink our praxis in the world. We desire that they are intertwined multi dimensionally (institutional spaces, temporalities), from renewed epistemological and ontological matrixes.
We invite our participants to put into context their narratives through one or more of the diverse PEs. Among them, we would like to generate discussions from latino-american PEs, urban PEs and feminist PEs, all understood as (radical) contributions that go to the roots of actual dilemmas, focusing the many ways of oppression still concentrated on the (geopolitical, symbolic, intersectional) “South”, such as dominant urbanities and their problematic imaginaries, the subjugation and erasing attempts of subversive/rebel/different othernesses. Such PE currents seem to point out consistent and defying praxiological concepts and strategies to strengthen the militancies, at the same time that they point out for a major empiric-methodological commitment (like in David Harvey and Erik Swyngedouw), a best acknowledgment of the sociocultural diversity of ontological designs (the pluriverses by Arturo Escobar), and the possibility that we can recognize a major complexity by considering the humans/non-humans/super-humans hybrid agencies (as the cyborgs by Donna Haraway).
How the renewed – mainly due to social activisims – notions of praxis, design and agency are contributing to the (re)connection, (re)invention and strengthening of our militancies? How every researcher (re)elaborates her/his praxiological categories and alterities (behind the curtains) in the middle of new threats and emergent solidarities? Until which point we can act and be “not so western”, “not so purely humans”, “not so white and male” in our theoretical-methodological proposals (both academic and political ones)? What other senses and forces we could put into play as to reach, this way, our empirical approaches on environmental conflicts, disasters, social cartographies, pollutions/epidemics, spoliations, imaginaries, socio-ecological militancies, class/gender/ethnic violences, de(re)territorializations, assassination of community leaders, coups d´etat, and dictatorships?
This way we call our participants to review the methodological situations and contexts of their research investigations and militancies, in order that we can reflect alltogether on the heuristic power and limitations of these and other approaches of the PEs, to project – and asking for – a new horizon of new design of transformative praxis. And for that, we suggest a not-fragmented review of our biographies, with their baggage of intuitions and emotions, discoveries, solidarities, utopias, precarities and anxieties (normally wasted by actual academy and politics).
POLLEN 