POLLEN February Updates

Dear POLLEN Members and Friends,

Greetings from your new Secretariat hosts at the Australian National University! It’s exciting to take on this role from Jens Friis Lund and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen, who have done a fantastic job coordinating POLLEN over the last year.

We have had a busy month picking up POLLEN’s twitter feed, and learning the inner workings of POLLEN’s website, node register, and of course this monthly newsletter. We would welcome your feedback and suggestions at any time – write to us at politicalecologynetwork@gmail.com

There are lots of updates to share this month, including preliminary information on POLLEN 2022, CfPs, publications from our community and more. We are also introducing the Massey University POLLEN Node. Enjoy the read!

Best wishes, 

POLLEN Secretariat
Sango Mahanty | Sarah Milne | Ratchada Arpornsilp and colleagues at the ANU POLLEN node

POLLEN 2022
Our host for POLLEN 2022, the POLLEN node at University of KwaZulu-Natal, has just launched the conference website where you can find preliminary information – check it out:  https://pollen2022.com/
We will learn more about this dynamic node in our next newsletter!

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 across our community. This month: Massey University’s Political Ecology Research Centre in New Zealand.

PERC Massey University’s Political Ecology Research Centre’s (PERC) growing membership reflects the interdisciplinarity of political ecology. PERC began as a collaboration between the School of People Environment and Planning and the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University. Their work involves collaborations across the following disciplines: social anthropology, media studies, ecology, geography, sociology, English, zoology, development studies, creative writing, politics, education, chemistry, environmental management, and engineering.   PERC provides a site of collaboration and networking for national and international researchers with a shared interest in social and environmental justice, inequities, decolonisation, and resource politics.  Since its establishment in 2016, it has organised four conferences, three of which have been free, online, international, open-access and nearly carbon neutral.  These conferences are still available to the public on this website.  PERC also drafts submissions and letters to government, presents seminars and webinars, produces books, and (pre-COVID), hosts international scholars.  Their second book Plastic Legacies: Politics, Persistence, and Politics will be in published in June 2021 Its members Dr Trisia Farrelly is Co-Director of PERC. Her work contributes to building capacity in NZ and the large ocean, small island developing states (LOSIDS) of Oceania to strengthen plastic pollution science, public engagement, and ultimately, effective policy frameworks. Trisia’s current work focusses on plastic pollution as waste colonialism in Oceania.     Dr Sy Taffel co-directs PERC and researches political ecologies of digital media, technological solutionism and the social, cultural and political impacts of digital technologies. Sy is the author of Digital Media Ecologies (Bloomsbury 2019),and along with Nicholas Holm he co-edited the anthology Ecological Entanglements in the Anthropocene. He also makes documentary/activist films, including for environmental groups such as the Environment Network Manawatu and Carrying Our Future.   Nicholas Holm is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies. His research mainly explores the political role of popular culture and entertainment media, but he also has a long running interest in the political status of overlooked and derided forms of nonhuman life and environmental interaction. His most recent work in this area is an article on feral cats forthcoming in a special issue of Society and Animals. Nick directed the 2018 conference “Feral.”   Professor Glenn Banks Leads the School of People, Environment and Planning at Massey University. His research mainly focuses on the socio-economic and cultural dimensions of large-scale, private sector investment in the extractive industries in Papua New Guinea. This research is framed by theoretical concerns with development, local agency and empowerment. Glenn’s current collaborative work critically examines private sector claims of corporate social responsibility in the tourism and resource extraction sectors, based on case studies in Fiji and Papua New Guinea. This research connects with applied contracted research and consultancy for institutional and private sector actors in the region’s extractive sector.   Sita Venkateswar is Programme Coordinator and Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology programme at Massey University.  She is also Associate Director of the New Zealand India Research Institute. Her current research interests include agroecological, regenerative and multispecies approaches to farming and food futures. She applies intersectional and decolonizing research methodologies within contemporary contexts of Aotearoa New Zealand and South Asia.   Alice Beban is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Massey University. She researches land rights, agricultural production, and gender concerns to understand people’s changing relationships with land and water from a feminist political ecology perspective. Recent projects include research on ‘land grabs’ and redistributive land reform in Cambodia, cross-border migration of smallholder farmers in the Mekong Delta, gendered agrarian transformation and the right to food, and mapping cultural change in dam-affected communities along the Mekong river. Her new book, “Unwritten Rule” (Cornell, 2021) examines land politics as a lens through which to understand democracy in Cambodia.    Ingrid Horrocks is a creative writer and literary scholar based on Massey’s Wellington campus. She writes about the long history of the politics of mobility and place and is interested in ways in which we can rec-conceptualise the ecological imagination. Her latest nonfiction book, Where We Swim, is a blend of memoir, travel, and ecological imaginings, both local and global. Ingrid’s other publications include two poetry collections, a book on women wanderers published by Cambridge UP, and the co-edited collection, Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays on Place from Aotearoa New Zealand.   Jonathon Hannon is the coordinator of the Zero Waste Academy, based at Massey University. This role involves teaching, research supervision, industry / community consultation and advisory on campus and city sustainability. Jonathon is currently undertaking a PhD evaluating municipal zero waste methodologies. Jonathon’s most recent publication is:    Laura Jean McKay is the author of the Animals in That Country (Scribe, 2020), winner of the Victorian Prize for Literature; and Holiday in Cambodia (Black Inc. 2013). She is a lecturer in creative writing at Massey University, with a PhD from the University of Melbourne focusing on literary animal studies. Her research focuses on interspecies communication, ecofiction, extinction and decolonising literatures. Laura is the ‘animal expert’ presenter on ABC Listen’s Animal Sound Safari.   Tom Doig is an environmental journalist and creative writing and media studies scholar, based at Massey’s Manawatū campus. His research areas include: disaster studies; literary journalism studies; and the social implications of the climate crisis. He is the author of Hazelwood (Penguin, 2020), The Coal Face (Penguin, winner of the 2015 Oral History Victoria Education Innovation Award) and Mörön to Mörön: Two men, two bikes, one Mongolian misadventure (Allen & Unwin, 2013).   Philip Steer is an Associate Professor of English. Philip researches literary responses to the environmental violence of settler colonialism. He is Primary Investigator of the Marsden project “Settler Literature and Environmental Change in Colonial New Zealand and Australia” (2020-2022), and co-edited Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (Fordham University Press). Philip co-organised  Rapua te Kura Huna: Opening Our Environmental Archives, a workshop of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural dialogue around archives of environmental knowledge from the period of colonisation (February 2021).

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!

The POLLEN Advisory Collective

The POLLEN Assembly at POLLEN20 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, to share experience and other forms of support. Look here for more information about the collective and its current membership.

Publications
 
Benjaminsen, Tor and Svarstad, Hanne (2021) Political Ecology: a critical engagement with global environmental issues. Palgrave. https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030560355

Cederlöf, Gustav (2021) Out of Steam: Energy, Materiality, and Political Ecology. Progress in Human Geography 45(1): 70–87.

Christiansen, J. (2021). Fixing fictions through blended finance: The entrepreneurial ensemble and risk interpretation in the Blue Economy. Geoforum 120, 93-102. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.01.013

Hewitson, Lee John and Sullivan, Sian (2021) Producing elephant commodities for ‘conservation hunting’ in Namibian communal-area conservancies. Journal of Political Ecology. https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/jpe/article/id/2279/

Köpke, Sören (2021) Contested Conservation, Ethnopolitics, and the State: The Case of Wilpattu Forest Complex, Sri Lanka. Conservation and Society 2021;19:57-67. DOI: 10.4103/cs.cs_19_113

Oguz, Zeynep (2021) Cavernous politics: Geopower, territory and the Kurdish question in Turkey. Political Geography. Vol 85: March. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0962629820303942?via%3Dihub

Roy, Brototi (2021). A Report of the Third Biennial POLLEN (Political Ecology Network) Conference, 2020. Ecology, Economy and Society – the INSEE Journal. https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v4i1.358

Verweijen, Judith and Dunlap, Alexander. (2021) The evolving techniques of social engineering, land control and managing protest against extractivism: Introducing political (re)actions ‘from above’. Political Geography 83:1-9. https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1cWYM3Qu6uX%7EbK

Political Geography: Virtual forum on Environmental limits, Scarcity and Degrowth: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/political-geography/special-issue/10SV5DM3NW5

Working papers, blogs and media

Acharya, Amitangshu and Sanyal, Sudipto (2021) Where there’s muck there’s brass: making money from sewage in Kolkata. The Economist. https://www.economist.com/1843/2021/01/13/where-theres-muck-theres-brass-making-money-from-sewage-in-kolkata
Dunlap, Alexander and Brock, Andrea. (2021) When the Wolf Guards the Sheep: Green Extractivism in Germany and Mexico. Working Paper 21, University of Sussex, Centre for Global Political Economy (CGPE). https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=when-the-wolf-guards-the-sheep-dunlap-and-brock.pdf&site=359

Dunlap A and Glederloos P. (2021a) An Interview with Peter Gelderloos, Part I: Anarchism and Environmental Struggle. Terra Nullius: Repossessing the existent, Available at: https://www.sum.uio.no/forskning/blogg/terra-nullius/alexander-dunlap/an-interview-with-peter-gelderloos-part-i-anarchism.html.

Dunlap A and Glederloos P. (2021b) An Interview with Peter Gelderloos, Part II: From Colonial Trauma to Ecological Resurgence. Terra Nullius: Repossessing the existent, Available at: https://www.sum.uio.no/forskning/blogg/terra-nullius/alexander-dunlap/an-interview-with-peter-gelderloos-part-ii.html.

Kolinjivadi, Vijay (2021) It is time to end extractive tourism. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/2/18/it-is-time-to-end-extractive-tourism

MARIPOLDATA Team (2020) Key findings from our study of the marine biodiversity field and why our data matters for the new BBNJ treaty.

Tessnow-von Wysocki, I. (2021) Speech is silver – Science is gold: The Voice of Science within UN negotiations for the Ocean.

CfPs, Conferences, Talks
 
CfP: Annual Political Science Workshops of the Low Countries (https://politicologenetmaal.eu): Challenging Anthropocentrism in Political Science: Gender, Race, Intersectionality and the More-than-Human. See this link for further details on this CfP: https://politicologenetmaal.eu/workshop-list/#workshop2 – Instructions for submitting abstracts are on the website, due 31 March 2021. 

CfP: Rupture and the reimagining of nature-society. Submissions welcome for this exciting panel at the joint Institute of Australian Geographers and New Zealand Geographical Society conference – please send these by 5 April 2021. For further details, see #27 at this link – there are lots of other interesting panels as well, and you can find details for this July conference here.

CfP: Central Asian Journal of Water Research special issue on ‘30 Years of Farm Restructuring and Water Management Reforms in Central Asia.’ Further details here: https://water-ca.org/news/cfp-special-issue-30-years-of-reforms, due June 15, 2021.
Teaching Convivial Conservation: Rebecca Witter (witterrc@appstate.edu) is keen to hear from POLLEN members who would like to convene a virtual conversation about Teaching Convivial Conservation. A conversation like this might be a way to generate ideas, to share resources, and to develop more energy and capacity around conviviality in conservation – both for those who are already teaching this approach and for those who might like to start. Please contact Rebecca if you are interested!

Is a local or global food system more sustainable? How big should a farm be? Debates about the future of food have become more polarised than ever – and little attention is paid to why people hold genuinely different beliefs. The Feed podcast, presented by TABLE, aims to fill this gap by exploring the evidence, worldviews, and values that people bring to global food system debates.

Folks with an marine interest might like to check out this monthly seminar series: MARIPOLDATA Ocean Seminar Series

Vacancies and courses

Please check the links for details and closing dates.

PhD positions (2-5 are at the Helmholtz-Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity):

1. PhD position at Ruhr University Bochum on the A political ecology approach in evaluating the development agenda: The cases of Ghana and Kenya.  Details here:  http://adapted-eu.org/open-esr-positions/esr-6-10/esr-6  
2. PhD position in “Benthic Geopolitics” : https://recruitingapp-5442.de.umantis.com/Vacancies/781/Description/2 
3. Phd position in “Biodiversity, Scale, and Difference in Marine Space” within the Marine Governance Group Marine Governance Group  https://recruitingapp-5442.de.umantis.com/Vacancies/778/Description/2
4. PhD position in “Dynamic ocean governance: Rethinking space, time and movement in managing marine environments” https://uol.de/stellen?stelle=67863
5. PhD position in “Emotional governance: The place of feelings in marine management” https://uol.de/stellen?stelle=67864
6. PhD position in Political Ecology of Natural Climate Solutions at the Department of Food and Resource Economics Univeristy of Copenhagen: https://jobportal.ku.dk/alle-opslag/?show=153559

Academic positions:

1. Research Scientist Position: “Follow the enforcement: Spatialising understandings of monitoring, reporting and sanctioning at sea” (m/f/d) within the Marine Governance Group at Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research https://recruitingapp-5442.de.umantis.com/Vacancies/770/Description/2
2. Research Scientist Position: “Maritime motorways, global ship routeing and the governance of marine biodiversity” (m/f/d) within the Marine Governance Group Marine Governance Group at Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research https://recruitingapp-5442.de.umantis.com/Vacancies/769/Description/2
3. Three faculty positions at National University of Singapore in Social/Cultural Geographies addressing contemporary crises of sustainability in Asia (two positions at Assistant Professor level on the tenure-track and one at Associate or Full Professor level with tenure): Assistant Professor positions (tenure-track): see here.
   Tenured Associate/Full Professor (with tenure): see here.
4. The Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of
   Freiburg, Germany has two 2-year Junior Fellowships within the  “Young Academy for Sustainability Research”, details here:
   https://www.frias.uni-freiburg.de/de/aktuelles/wiss-ausschreibungen/junior-fellowships-young-academy