June 2020 Updates

Dear POLLEN Members and Friends,

June has again been a month of big changes globally and accordingly, also across the network. In this month’s newsletter we are introducing a node from Edinburgh; some updates on POLLEN20; a number of exciting new publications, blog posts and podcasts; as well as conferences, calls for papers and vacancies.

Thank you all for the input and happy reading!

Best wishes, 

POLLEN Secretariat

NOTE: the updates below are a copy of the original newsletter, and therefore might not contain all hyperlinks and media. To access the original with full content, as well as to see previous newsletters, follow this link: https://us20.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=71814a42a0d2d8f390cbee1be&id=3fe97edf35

Getting to know your fellow POLLEN members Since last month, every monthly newsletter includes a brief introduction to one of the many POLLEN nodes. We hope this will help build better connections between our community. Our second ‘virtual visit’ is at the School of GeoSciences and School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Enjoy!

Short group bio We are a loose collection of staff and students spread across the School of GeoSciences and School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Our work encompasses a wide variety of interests including political ecology, post-development politics, animal studies, nature geographies, conservation and protected areas, environmental and social justice, indigenous knowledge, agrarian transitions, ecosystem services, ethnographies of conservation and development, state and non-state actors, policy translation and rural governance, displacement and migration, social movements, indigenous strategies of resistence, story-telling and more! We work in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Ecuador, Canada – oh, and Scotland! We are Sam Spiegel, Krithika Srinivasan, Janet Fisher, Clare Barnes, Omar Saif, Anjali Dalal, Henry Myers, Jiayen Lai, Margherita Scazza and Sam Staddon – although we are also inspired by other colleagues working across our Schools, including those for example in the PhD group Environment & Society Student Forum and in the academic-practitioner group Edinburgh Environment & Development Network.    Fun fact Belonging to different Schools and being involved in different research groups across those Schools, we have not yet met as an active POLLEN node – but this request to contribute here has brought us together and we will try harder in future! A Political Ecology Reading Group has recently been set up by Omar Saif and has brought together staff, students and practitioners from across Edinburgh – this has continued in recent months online (see photo) and so perhaps this is the natural home for our POLLEN node.

POLLEN20 Updates and action points Dear POLLEN friends,   As you may already know, the Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network, Contested Natures: Power, Politics, Prefiguration, was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Following our earlier announcement that POLLEN20 will be moving, in a restructured form, to a virtual platform and has been rescheduled for the 22nd – 25th of September 2020, we have sent updates and action points to session organizers and presenters and posted them on the conference event page. We want to make sure that everyone receives this information, so please excuse this message if you have already received this and taken required action.   If you have not received this correspondence, to help facilitate this transition to virtual, we have included action points required for session organizers (1) and regarding registration for all participants (2) below. We request that these be completed by 30 June 2020. These action points pertain to only to organizers and participants in sessions that were previously accepted for the conference, and you will need your session code(s) in hand.   (1) Updates to sessions: We are offering session organizers a chance to make adjustments to sessions that were accepted and submitted earlier in the year. We ask you as a session organizer or co-organizer to share updated information about the conference and its move to a virtual platform with participants in your session(s) and confirm or make changes to organized sessions by 30 June 2020. Please let us know at your earliest convenience at this link: Session confirmation and changes form. This should only be completed by session organizers and should include all changes to the accepted session. With this very short form you will have the option to:Confirm that your sessions, including all submitted presentations / panelists will go ahead as planned,Let us know about changes to a session or sessions that you are organizing, orLet us know if you wish to withdraw a session from the conference.  (2) Registration, re-registration and fee adjustment for organizers and participants in organized sessions (due by 30 June 2020). Please select the option below that fits your situation.If you are an organizer of or presenter in an session that has been accepted for POLLEN20 and you missed registration, cancelled or withdrew your prior registration and need to re-register, a new registration can be completed in the ExOrdo system. You will need your session code(s) to complete registration.If you already registered for POLLEN20 and chose to hold your registration and fees (i.e. did not request to withdraw and have your fees refunded), you will see your completed registration when you log in to the ExOrdo system. If you are already registered, we ask you to complete a ‘Changes to Registration or Fees’ form here to make adjustments to your conference fees no later than 30 June 2020. If you do not take this action, we will assume that you are happy to donate the additional fees that you paid to the POLLEN Solidarity Fund.With best regards, The POLLEN20 organizing team

Promoting POLLEN collaboration

Do you write with other members of POLLEN? In attempts to promote collaboration across the POLLEN nodes, please consider putting the following statement in the acknowledgements of your paper: ‘This article represents work conducted as part of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN).’ 

When you do, please let us know about it so we can tweet it out on @PolEcoNet and get it in the next newsletter!

Publications Apostolopoulou, E. (2020). Nature Swapped and Nature Lost. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. Bennett, N.J., Blythe, J., White, C. & Campero, C. (2020). IOF Working Paper #2020 – 02. Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Brock A (2020) Securing accumulation by restoration – exploring spectavular corporate conservation, coal mining and biodiversity compensation in the German Rhineland. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. Coolsaet, B. (forthcoming). Environmental justice: Key Issues. Routledge. Author’s note: the book is a toolkit for junior researchers, graduate students, upper-level undergraduates, and anyone in need of a comprehensive introductory textbook on environmental justice. Deutsch, Sierra. 2020. “Who doesn’t like dolphins?!” Neoliberalization, variegated environmentalities, and value alterations in a cross-national comparison of Irrawaddy dolphin conservation. Geoforum Dunlap, A. and Correa-Cabrera, G. (2020).  Opinion: Michael Moore Documentary ‘Planet of the Humans’ unveils flaws with renewable energy, Houston Chronicle Fisher, J., Duffy, J., He, J., Inturias, M., Lehmann, I., Martin, A., Mwayafu, D., Rodriguez, I. & Schneider, H. (2020) Conservationists’ perspectives on poverty: an empirical study.People and Nature. Fletcher, R., Büscher, B., Massarella, K. and Koot, S. (2020). ‘Close the tap!’: COVID-19 and the need for convivial conservation. Journal of Australian Political Economy 85: 200-211. Open access Inturias, M., G. Vargas, I. Rodríguez, A. García, K. von Stosch, E. Masay (Eds)  (2019) Territorios, justicias y autonomías: un diálogo desde los gobiernos autónomos indígenas de Bolivia. Instituto de investigación científica social de la Universidad NUR. Bolivia. Editorial NUR: Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Bolivia. Kolinjivadi, V. “Conditionality as dispossession? The socio-cultural injustice of “payments for ecosystem services” (PES). 15 June, 2020. Lind, J., Okenwa, D., & Scoones, I. (2020). Land, investment & politics Reconfiguring Eastern Africa’s pastoral drylands. Rochester, NY: James Currey / Boydell & Brewer Inc. Buy with discount code: BB135 Marks, D., & Elinoff, E. (2019). Splintering disaster: relocating harm and remaking nature after the 2011 floods in Bangkok. International Development Planning Review, (0), 1-22. Nel, A. (2020). Conciliatory whiteness: white farmers’ accommodations and responses to land reform in Matabeleland South, Zimbabwe. Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 1-17. Partelow, S., Winkler, K. J. & Thaler, G. M. (2020) Environmental non-governmental organizations and global environmental discourse. PLoS One 12–15.  Rodriguez, I. (2020). The Latin American Decolonial Environmental Justice approach. In Coolsaet, B.  (Ed) Environmental Justice. Key Issues. Earthscan from Routledge. ISBN 9780367139933. 344 Pps. Vila Benites, Gisselle y Bebbington, Anthony (2020): “Political Settlements and the Governance of COVID-19: Mining, Risk, and Territorial Control in Peru”, in: Journal of Latin American Geography, Ahead of Print. Zinzani, A., Proto, M. (2020). The rise of the Political in response to urban regeneration process in Bologna: Social movements and spaces of dissent. GEOTEMA, Supplemento 2020, 45-54.

New Journal: Frontiers in Human Dynamics Political Ecology See journal on this link.  This open access journal has an exciting international editorial team. A key goal of this journal is to foster debate across what are becoming somewhat separate conversations within nature-society studies. The journal is now open for submissions. Publication fees are moderate and fee waivers available for authors without institutional support to cover publication costs. We endeavour to review papers in a timely manner and once accepted, contributions become available on line immediately. Political Ecology welcomes inter-disciplinary contributions on society-nature questions. We foster novel and cutting-edge responses to challenges including (but not limited to) governance of resources, land use and tenure, conservation and biodiversity, marine environments, fossil fuels and green energy, nature tourism, climate change adaptation and mitigation, resource extraction and environmental ethics. The specialty section reflects the plurality of ontological and epistemological approaches to society-environment dynamics that have helped to bring vibrancy to political ecology including historical materialism, critical realism, science and technology studies (STS), cultural politics, feminist and queer theory, political ontologies, posthumanism, socioecological systems, sustainability science, and social construction framings. Novel theoretical and empirical approaches are encouraged but should be focused on environment or nature broadly defined. Our first issue will be a speciality section on Political Ecologies of COVID-19 edited by Andrea Nightingale, Seema Arora Jonsson, Nitin Rai and Juanita Sundberg. In this Research Topic we seek papers that engage with political ecologies of COVID-19. We welcome articles that are based on empirical research in specific contexts, attempting to understand the impacts of the viral outbreak, as well as articles which lay out research agendas for political ecologies of COVID-19. What questions need to be asked? What does it mean to take a socionatural and political ecological approach? What can we learn from the state(s) response in different places? How can such analyses add to the global conversation about the pandemic? Submissions are due in November and authors should submit abstracts by the end of the July. Read more here.

From our friends at Undisciplined Environments Are ‘Nature-based Solutions’ an answer to unsustainable cities or a tool for furthering nature’s neoliberalisation? By Panagiota Kotsila (June 2, 2020) Reimagining, remembering, and reclaiming water: From extractivism to commoning By Gustavo García-López, Irene Leonardelli and Emanuele Fantini (June 9, 2020) Reflections on the Virus as an Opportunity for Radical Societal Change By Christos Zografos (June 11, 2020) Countering water colonialism: Indigenous peoples’ rights, responsibilities and international water governance frameworks By Kat Taylor, Sheri Longboat and Quentin Grafton (June 16, 2020) Contesting private urbanism in Greater Buenos Aires: Neighborhood assemblies in defense of life By Vanina P. Santy (June 23, 2020)

Conferences, Calls for Papers and Courses CfP: Seeking contributions to a proposed edited book: Enforcing Ecological Catastrophe: The Police and Military as drivers of Climate Change and Ecocide. Read more here. Conference: “Extraction: Tracing the Veins”. Dates: 29th June – 10th July. Massey University Political Ecology Research Centre and Wageningen University. Read more here.

Blog posts, articles, podcasts BIOSEC & Bubbles episode 4: Understanding and reducing demand in wildlife – Laure Joanny talks to Anh Vu and Jared Margulies BIOSEC & Bubbles episode 5: Drones and Databases – the Appeal of technology for Conservation – Laure Joanny and George Iordachescu  Rosaleen Duffy, George Iordachescu, Teresa Lappe-Osthege and Hannah Dickinson wrote a response to the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030. Available here. George Iordachescu, Criminalisation, crisis narratives and the commission: the fight against deforestation in Europe In Biosec Project  Sarah Bezan, Novelty, desire and the nature of precedent: human-animal relations in the age of COVID-19 In Biosec Project Mihnea Tanasescu, Rights + Nature = ?  In Civil Animal Finding Sustainability Podcast episodes out this month:044: Policy processes and advocacy coalitions with Chris Weible043: Team science in academia and resource management practice with Kenneth Wallen042: Rethinking the monetary system for social and ecological equity with Joseph AmentLUXR Podcast – Episode 3: Dr. Benjamin Neimark – (May 25, 2020) Love and Rage 🦆 Your hosts Josh and Skander talk with Lancaster University Senior Lecturer Dr. Benjamin Neimark who specialises in political ecology. Ben talks to us about bioprospecting in Madagascar, the fuel emissions and carbon “boot-print” of the US Military as well as his views on environmental movements at LU and abroad. Let us know your thoughts at luxr@email.com as well as what you’d like us to talk about next!  La conformación de las Ciencias de la Tierra de Posguerra – Ronald E. Doel In NIPEA

Vacancies Tenure-track or tenured positions: The Department of Geography, National Taiwan University (NTU) is seeking applications for 1 to 2 tenure-track or tenured positions at all ranks beginning in February 2021. We invite applicants with a Ph.D. degree in geography or related disciplines, whose research will strengthen the department’s human/physical geography or GIScience programs. Read full job description here. Vacancy: Professor in Rural Development with a focus on the Global South. Department of Urban and Rural Development, The Faculty of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Uppsala, Sweden. Application deadline: August 3, 2020. Read more by visiting the vacancy website.

Other news BIOSEC Newsletter number 8 is out, and available to read here.