POLLEN January Updates

Dear POLLEN Members and Friends,

We have a packed newsletter to start the year with – lots of new publications, the introduction of the POLLEN Advisory Collective, CfPs, seminar and speaker series, courses, and more. We are also introducing the newly established Levant Node. Enjoy the read!

Best wishes, 

POLLEN Secretariat

NOTE: the updates below are a copy of the original newsletter, and therefore might not contain all hyperlinks and content. 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 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 next ‘virtual visit’ is to the Levant Node. Enjoy!

Short group bioTaraf Abu Hamdan, Jacob Cassani, Mathilde Gingembre, Anders Hastrup, Hussam Hussein and China Sajadian have recently come together to form a POLLEN Node for the Levant region. Coming from different institutions representing multiple disciplinary background (Anthropology, Development Studies, Political economy, Public Policy, Refugee Studies, Environmental Sciences, and International Relations), we have been brought together by common research interests around resource politics, environmental governance, food systems environmental justice, climate change, forced exile and agrarian livelihoods in the Levant region. Our aim is to foster collaboration, as well as critical discussions and reflections related to the different transformations and dynamics occurring around resource politics in the Levant, both in the ways it connects to the macro global picture, as well as, the micro-local contexts. This node is in its initial phase and we encourage interested researchers and practitioners to get in touch for potential collaborations and discussions (contact email: mathilde.gingembre@gmail.com; tarafj@gmail.com). Also, we’ll be sharing our work and discussing resource politics of the Levant @LevanPolEcol on twitter. Taraf Abu Hamdan is a PhD candidate at Central European University, researching coping strategies of rural communities to environmental stresses, state/tribe relations, resource governance, formal and informal institutions influence on community vulnerability, and livelihoods. Jacob Cassani is an anthropologist at UCL. His research deals with the relationship between Syrian refugees and Lebanese hashish farming communities in the central Biqa’a valley (Lebanon), focusing on rural labour organisation and refugee/camp governance. Dr. Mathilde Gingembre is a Beirut-based researcher affiliated with the Pastres project. She researches farmers’ participation in environmental governance, environmental justice, extractivism, land rights, and pastoral livelihoods (Lebanon, Jordan and Madagascar) D. Anders Hastrup holds a PhD in Anthropology/Refugee Studies focusing on the war in Darfur, Sudan He is a Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen in the project “Viable Futures – Near and Long Term Prospects Among Syrian Youth in Jordan”, with a focus on Syrian youth in the Jordanian agricultural sector. He has a MA in Arabic and has translated modern Syrian short stories focusing on the refugee crisis from Arabic to his native Danish. Dr. Hussam Hussein is a Lecturer in International Relations and Research Fellow in Water Politics at the University of Oxford. China Sajadian is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center researching circuits of debt, histories of displacement, and agricultural labor between the Jazira plateau of Syria and the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. Fun fact We have started working on a library for political ecology readings and interesting resources. Along with it, we have plans to start a writing/ reading group to share our works in progress and get feedback and share ideas. We hope we can expand this with other researchers from the region and across POLLEN nodes.

Let’s come together as a network to support the new secretariat!  Crawford School of Public Policy, Canberra, Australia are new secretariat hosts. In line with the spirit of inclusivity in POLLEN, the hosts have offered to take this on without having the funding to make it work in practice, but in the hope that the network would step in to collectively support the function financially. Let’s do this! A crowdfunding link has been created, see here.

Promoting POLLEN collaborationDo 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!

Introducing the POLLEN Advisory Collective  At the latest POLLEN Assembly held during POLLEN20 it was decided to establish a POLLEN Advisory Collective consisting of people who have engaged with the network in various respects. The purpose of the collective is to function as POLLEN’s institutional memory and as a go-to resource for the POLLEN secretariat and network nodes for advice, guidance, sharing of experience and other forms of support. The collective is now officially in place and hopefully it will be of use for the entire network! Look here for more information about the collective and its current membership.

Publications Apostolopoulou, E., Kotsila, P. 2021. Community gardening in Hellinikon as a resistance struggle against neoliberal urbanism: Spatial autogestion and the right to the city in post-crisis Athens. Urban Geography. Boast, H. (2020). Hydrofictions: Water, Power and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Literature. Edinburgh University Press Limited. Boucher, J. L., Kwan, G. T., Ottoboni, G. R., and McCaffrey, M. S. 2021. “From the suites to the streets: Examining the range of behaviors and attitudes of international climate activists.” Energy Research & Social Science 72:101866.  Boucher, J. L., Levenda, A. M., Morales‐Guerrero, J., Macias, M. M., and Karwat, D. M. A. 2020. “Establishing a Field of Collaboration for Engineers, Scientists, and Community Groups: Incentives, Barriers, and Potential.” Earth’s Future 8(10), e2020EF001624. Damiens, F. L. P., Backstrom, A. and Gordon, A. (2021) ‘Governing for “no net loss” of biodiversity over the long term: challenges and pathways forward’, One Earth, 4(1), pp. 60–74. Fischer, Harry. Forthcoming. Decentralization and the governance of climate adaptation: Situating community-based planning within broader trajectories of political transformation. World Development.  Gupta, Divya, Harry Fischer, Suchita Shrestha, Syed Shoaib Ali, Ashwini Chhatre, Kamal Devkota, Dil Khatri, Pushpendra Rana. Forthcoming. Dark and bright spots in the shadow of the pandemic: Rural livelihoods, state support, and local governance in India and Nepal. World Development. Johnson, M., Sveinsdóttir, A.G., and Guske, E.L. (2021). The Dakota Access Pipeline in Illinois: Participation, Power, and Institutional Design in United Sates Critical Energy Infrastructure Governance, Energy Research and Social Science, 73.  LaVanchy, T., Taylor, M., Alvarado, N. A., Sveinsdóttir, A.G, & Aguilar-Støen, M. (2020). Tourism in Post-revolutionary Nicaragua: Struggles over Land, Water, and Fish. (SpringerBriefs in Latin American Studies). Springer International Publishing.  Moseley, W.G. 2021. “Development Assistance and Boserupian Intensification under Geopolitical Isolation: The Political Ecology of a Crop-Livestock Integration Project in Burundi.” Geoforum. Oskarsson, P., Nielsen, K. B., Lahiri-Dutt, K., & Roy, B. (2021). India’s new coal geography: Coastal transformations, imported fuel and state-business collaboration in the transition to more fossil fuel energy. Energy Research & Social Science, 73, 101903.  Phillips,J.andPetrova, S (2021)The materiality of precarity: gender, race and energy infrastructure in urban South Africa. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space Sveinsdóttir, A.G. and Aguilar-Støen, M. and Bull, B. (2021). Resistance, repression and elite dynamics: Unpacking violence in the Guatemalan mining sector. Geoforum, 18, pp. 117-129.

CfPs, Conferences, Talks  CfP: Nordia Geographical Publications Theme Issue 2021 Re-worlding: Pluriversal politics in the Anthropocene. The Geographical Society of Northern Finland and the Geography Research Unit at the University of Oulu are inviting contributors to the Nordia Geographical Publications Theme Issue coming out in late 2021 with the topic Pluriversal Politics in the Anthropocene. The Nordia Geographical Publications is a peer-reviewed, open access academic journal focusing on contemporary conversations and openings in Geography. Deadline for applying: 31.3.2021. See full call here. GEOS: is a recently launched research project of the Knowledge, Technology, and Innovation (KTI) Group of Wageningen University. Our work brings together philosophical and empirical research on global negotiations of knowledge and social-environmental challenges. We aim to understand heterogeneous knowledge about socio-environmental systems by equally heterogeneous actors from Indigenous farmers to laboratory scientists. For more information on our project, see this link. We also organize monthly seminars for which you can register on our website here. Speaker Series: Political Ecologies of Abolition and Sovereignty. Environmental perspectives shaped by Black and Indigenous knowledge have the power to shape our theories of environmental justice. Join us for new conversations at the intersections of Black and Indigenous geographies and political ecology. For the full program and scheduled webinars, see this link. All webinars from 12:00 noon to 1:15 pm PST KLI Dissertation Writing-up Fellowship Call: “Dealing with diversity in the life and sustainability sciences”. Deadline is Feb 15, 2021. Read full description here. Seminar series: entitled Conversations in Political Ecology. The first seminar will take place on Thursday 28th from 1-2pm GMT. The seminar will run monthly.

From our friends at Undisciplined Environments Too big to fail? REDD+ and the promise of forest-based climate mitigation By Adeniyi Asiyanbi and Jens Friis Lund (12 January 2021) Support Academic Freedom for Boğaziçi University Students and Faculty By Undisciplined Environments (13 January 2021) The Many Faces of Municipalisation By Undisciplined Environments (14 January 2021) Rooted Water Democracies and Water Justice  By Jeroen Vos and Rutgerd Boelens (19 January 2021) Environment and Sustainability in the globalised classroom By Anne Degenhardt, Batsaikhan Abdul Mohseen Yahya, and Beulah Seema Soans (21 January 2021)

Vacancies and courses Online course: Metodologías para el estudio de la conflictividad socio-ambiental en fuentes digitales./Methodologies for the study of socio-environmental conflict in digital sources. Six weeks, starting on February 2 (Tuesday). Professors: Marhylda Victoria Rivero Corona (POLLEN member) and Marx José Gómez-Liendo (POLLEN member) *Weekly live online lectures. Classes will be recorded and available after each session for all enrollees. The course provides tools for analysing the connections between the national and global context, identifying the disputes between different visions and languages of valuation of nature, revealing the interest of actors positioned in the conflict, and analysing the arguments to explain socio-environmental conflict. *Registration Here you can find more information about costs, syllabus, and certification. If you have additional questions, do not hesitate to contact formigas@iberoamericasocial.com.  PhD course: upcoming in August 2021, on “The political ecology of pandemics”. It is co-organized under the umbrella of POLLEN-Norway co/Tor Arve Benjaminsen. Read more details here.

Other news From Ben Neimark: Project Censored has chosen our The Conversation article—“US Military is a Bigger Polluter Than as Many as 140 Countries” —as one of the 25 most important news stories of 2019-2020 featured in our most recent yearbook, State of the Free Press 2021, published by Seven Stories Press. The Project’s annual story list highlights high-quality investigative reporting on important events and issues that have been marginalized or ignored by the corporate news media.