Dear POLLEN Members and Friends,
This month we are happy to introduce a new POLLEN node – the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. As always, we are also happy to share the latest publications from our lively community, CfPs, vacancies, and more. If your node is keen to feature your work in the upcoming newsletters, please write to us at politicalecologynetwork@gmail.com. It’s a great way to share and get dialogue around your work. We also welcome proposals for blog posts on the POLLEN blog – please contact us at the same email address with any ideas!
With regards from your POLLEN Secretariat:
Sango Mahanty | Sarah Milne | Ratchada Arpornsilp
Getting to know your fellow POLLEN members
Each monthly newsletter includes a brief introduction to one of the many POLLEN nodes to help build connections across our community. This month we would like to introduce you to one of our newest nodes: the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia.
University of Western Australia’s POLLEN node
Overview
The POLLEN node at the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia (UWA) brings together faculty members, early career researchers, and graduate students. We live and work on unceded Noongar Whadjukland, at the edge of the Indian Ocean, in the most isolated major city in the world. Western Australia’s economy largely is based on resource extraction. The destruction of some of the world’s oldest cultural sites is ongoing, including a site that showed human occupancy dating back 46 thousand years–destroyed in 2020 to access iron ore. In this context, the group covers diverse elements of political ecology, including interdisciplinary scholars working in geography, international relations, political economy, media, anthropology, and sociology. Our POLLEN node here has regional expertise in Western Africa, Southern Africa, the Himalaya, South-East Asia, Brazil, and, of course, Australia. They plan on hosting university, city, and (eventually) Australia-wide events.
Node members
Alexander E Davis is a lecturer in international relations at the University of Western Australia, where he teaches foreign policy, international relations theory, and global environmental politics. His research looks at international politics from critical, postcolonial, and ecological perspectives, particularly in South Asia and the Himalaya. He is particularly interested in how borders, state-making geopolitical disputes effect local peoples and ecologies in the Himalaya. As such, he is currently writing a research monograph, The Geopolitics of Melting Mountains: An International Political Ecology of the Himalaya (Palgrave, 2020). He is head of the Australian Himalaya Research Network.
Alicea Garcia recently completed her PhD with the Department of Geography and Planning at The University of Western Australia. Her work spans critical scholarship on climate change adaptation, political ecology, climate justice, and transformation. Her PhD research investigated how uneven relations of power in Ghana maintain social inequalities and differential capacities to adapt to climate change in rural communities. Alicea is particularly interested in engaging with diverse stakeholders through participatory methods and creative approaches to co-learning. She is currently collaborating on a Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) project focused on (re)negotiating power to enhance resilience to climate change.
Catie Gressier is an Australian Research Council (DECRA) Fellow in Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Western Australia. Catie’s research examines settler descendants’ environmental engagements in Australia and Botswana, with a focus on foodways, interspecies relations, tourism, and health and illness. Her current interest is in rare and heritage breed livestock farming across Australia. She is an Editorial Board Member of Anthropological Forum, a Director of the Rare Breeds Trust of Australia, and a former University of Melbourne MacArthur Fellow.
Charan Bal is a Lecturer in Political Science at the School of Social Sciences, University of Western Australia. His research interests broadly lie in the areas of politics, governance, and development in Southeast Asia. He is interested in how economic development and political conflict influence the governance of transnational issues such as labour migration and climate change. His current projects include a comparative study of multilevel climate change governance in the EU and ASEAN, the proliferation of private disclosure-based climate initiatives in Singapore and Indonesia, and an assessment of Migration-for-Development programs across Southeast Asia.
Clare Mouat is a lecturer in Geography at the University of Western Australia. Her work champions growing and greening democracy by rethinking community and via transformative governance innovation. As a scholar-storyteller for just, care-full, healthy, and inclusive cities and places, she is passionate about co-producing feasible and radically progressive responses to the local and global challenges and crises facing us, our families, and seven million of our closest neighbours. This means understanding the ethics, politics, plans, roadblocks and exploring the various strategies and roadmaps towards the kinds of places where we want to live, work, and play.
Greg Acciaioli is Senior Honorary Research Fellow in Anthropology and Sociology at The University of Western Australia. Current research foci include the interface of the Indigenous peoples’ movement with resource contestations in Sulawesi and Borneo, particularly those concerning the impact of national parks and other protected areas, a critical assessment of the World Bank’s Social Capital Initiative, and the Village Law in Indonesia in the context of the current regime’s new developmentalism, farmer innovation from below in the context of new agricultural regulatory regimes in Indonesia, and the adaptation of Bajau identities under the impact of conservation and securitization upon Bajau Laut in Sabah, Malaysia, especially in regard to the consequences of their statelessness.
Karen Paiva Henrique is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Western Australia. Her work lies at the intersection of climate adaptation, urban development, and multiple dimensions of justice. Dr Henrique’s PhD research examined the politics of flood adaptation in São Paulo, Brazil, demonstrating how state practices entwine with exclusionary development trajectories while sketching more inclusive and sustainable approaches from below. Her current work investigates how people in Western Australia make individual and collective decisions and trade-offs to protect the many things they value against the multifaceted socio-ecological impacts of the global climate crisis.
Katarina Damjanov is senior lecturer in digital media and communication design at the University of Western Australia. Katarina’s research spans media and cultural studies and social studies of science and technology, revolving around considerations of digital technologies, the governance of media infrastructures and the environmental impact of technological progress. Her recent work situates these inquiries in outer space and features in journals such Science, Technology & Human Values, Space and Culture, Environment and Planning D, Mobilities, and Space Policy.
Linda Wilson is a PhD candidate (Geography) at UWA. Linda had a 20-year career in the natural resource management and renewable energy sectors before returning to academia. Her PhD research into beekeeper resource insecurity funded by the CRC for Honey Bee Products is focussed on the interplay between natural resource management and sustainable livelihoods. Her sustainability research approach uses historical ecology and economic geography to develop a system understanding of the emergent phenomenon in the case study population of Western Australia’s commercial beekeepers.
Petra Tschakert is the Centenary Professor in Rural Development in the Department of Geography and Planning, University of Western Australia. She is trained as a human-environment geographer and conducts research at the intersection of political ecology, climate change adaptation, environmental/ climate/ mobility/ multispecies justice, and livelihood security. Her current work explores intangible harm in the context of climate change, with emphasis on poverty, vulnerability, and inequalities, and how citizens make trade-offs between the many things they value and, collectively, negotiate resilient trajectories through the climate crisis. Prof. Tschakert combines critical social science insights with grounded, participatory methods for collective learning and social change.
Promoting POLLEN collaboration
Do you write with other members of POLLEN?
To gain visibility for collaborations across our network, we invite you to consider adding something along these lines to your acknowledgments:
“This paper represents collaborative work with colleagues in the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN).”
PUBLICATIONS
Books
Morrison, R. 2021, The green republic, Waterside Productions, California.
Shapiro-Garza, L., Kolinjivadi, V., Van Hecken, G., Windey, C., & Casolo, J.J. 2021. ‘Praxis in resource geography: Tensions between engagement and critique in the (un)making of ecosystem services’, in M. Himley, E. Havice, & G. Valdivia (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography. Routledge, pp. 236-247.
Sullivan, S. & Ganuses, W.S. 2021, ‘Densities of meaning in west Namibian landscapes: genealogies, ancestral agencies, and healing’, in U. Dieckmann (ed.), Mapping the Unmappable? Cartographic Explorations with Indigenous Peoples in Africa. Bielefeld: Transcript, pp. 139-191.
Blogs
Morrison, R. 2021, ‘100% Carbon-free energy by 2035: Devil’s in the details’, Wall Street International Magazine, 1 June, <https://wsimag.com/economy-and-politics/65952-100-percent-carbon-free-energy-by-2035>.
Nielsen, K.B. 2021, ‘Land, agriculture, and dispossession in India: A comparative look at the ongoing farmers’ protests and the anti-SEZ movement’, Terra Nullius: Repossessing the existent, 19 May, <https://www.sum.uio.no/forskning/blogg/terra-nullius/kenneth-bo-nielsen/land-agriculture-and-dispossession-in-india.html>.
Journal articles
Arora-Jonsson, S., Colfer, CP., & Gonalez-Hidalgo, M. 2021, ‘Seeing the Quiet Politics in Unquiet Woods: A different vantage point for a future forest agenda’, Human Ecology, <https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-021-00233-0>.
Arora-Jonsson, S., & Larsson, O. 2021, ‘Lives in limbo: Migrant integration and rural governance in Sweden’, Journal of Rural Studies, vol. 82, pp. 19-28, <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2021.01.010>.
Boucher, J.L., Garfield T.K., Gina R.O., & Mark S.M. 2021, ‘From the suites to the streets: Examining the range of behaviors and attitudes of international climate activists’, Energy Research & Social Science, vol. 72,
<https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101866>.
Dressler, W. 2021, ‘Defending lands and forests: NGO histories, everyday struggles, and extraordinary violence in the Philippines’. Critical Asian Studies, pp. 1-32, <https://www-tandfonline-com/doi/full/10.1080/14672715.2021.1899834>.
Dunlap, A. 2021, ‘Renewable Energy and the War of Progress’, The Peace Chronicle, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 42-51,<https://www.peacejusticestudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Climate.pdf>.
Fair, H. 2021, ‘Playing with the Anthropocene: Board game imaginaries of islands, nature, and empire’, Island Studies Journal. Publication ahead of print: pp. 43-59, <https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.165>.
Hope, J. 2021, ‘Conservation in the Pluriverse: Anti-capitalist struggle, knowledge from resistance and the ‘repoliticisation of nature’ in the TIPNIS, Bolivia’, Geoforum, <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.04.006>.
Jakobsen, J. 2021, ‘New food regime geographies: Scale, state, labor’, World Development, vol. 145, <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105523>.
Lai, H.L. 2021, ‘Foregrounding the Community: Geo-Historical Entanglements of Community Energy, Environmental Justice, and Place in Taihsi Village, Taiwan’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space,
<https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211000745>.
Levain, A., Barthélémy, C., Bourblanc, M., Douguet, J-M., Euzen, A., & Souchon, Y. 2020, ‘Green out of the blue, or how (not) to deal with overfed oceans. An analytical review of coastal eutrophication and social conflict’, Environment & Society: Advances in Research, vol. 11, pp. 115-142,<https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/environment-and-society/11/1/ares110108.xml>.
Machen, R., & Nost, E. 2021, ‘Thinking algorithmically: The making of hegemonic knowledge in climate governance’, Transactions of the Institute of the British Geographers, vol. 1, pp. 1-15, <https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12441>.
Mostafanezhad, M., & Dressler, W. 2021, ‘Violent atmospheres: Political ecologies of livelihoods and crises in Southeast Asia’, Geoforum, <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718521001470>.
Powell, S., & Arora-Jonsson, S. 2021, ‘The conundrums of formal and informal meritocracy: dealing with gender segregation in the academy’, Higher Education, <https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-021-00719-2>.
Van Hecken, G., Kolinjivadi, V., Huybrechs, F., Bastiaensen, J., & Merlet, P. 2021, ‘Playing into the hands of the powerful: Extracting ‘success’ by mining for evidence in a Payments for Environmental Services (PES) project in Matiguas-Rio Blanco, Nicaragua’, Tropical Conservation Science, <https://doi.org/10.1177/19400829211020191; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/19400829211020191>.
CfPs
Anthropology and Conservation conference
“Positionality beyond ‘People versus Parks’: Anthropologists’ Engagement with Conservation in the 21st Century” – panel P062 will be organized at the Conference from 25th to 29th October 2021 online.
Please browse the full list of panels and decide where to propose your paper.
All proposals must be made via the online form that can be found on each panel page. The direct link for our panel is below: https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/rai2021/paper-form/10330
Proposals should consist of a title, a (very) short abstract of <300 characters, and an abstract of 250 words. On submission the proposal, the proposing author (but not any co-authors listed) will receive automated email confirming receipt.
The deadline for submission is 2nd July 2021.
Eric Wolf Paper Prize
The Political Ecology Society (PESO) announces the 2021 Eric Wolf Prize for the best article-length paper. The competition offers a great opportunity as the prize pays registration fees for the Society for Applied Anthropology annual meeting, offers a feature presentation of the paper at this meeting, and publication in the Journal of Political Ecology!
To be eligible for the competition, scholars must be no more than two years past the completion of their Master’s or PhD degree. This includes scholars who have not yet received the PhD and Master’s students.
Multiple authored papers are considered as long as the first author meets the above criteria. Papers that are already under review at a journal are not accepted.
The deadline for submission is 30th August 2021.
Please anonymize the submission and use the style guidelines provided on the Journal of Political Ecology webpage: http://jpe.library.arizona.edu. As the winning paper will be published in the Journal of Political Ecology, the prize reviewers may request revisions before the item is published. Electronic submissions and further queries should be sent to Dr. Elisabeth Moolenaar (emoolenaar@regis.edu).
Vacancies
The Department of Social and Policy Sciences invites applications for a post at the level of Lecturer (Assistant Professor) or Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in international development at the University of Bath. The Department is a world-class centre for research and teaching excellence, committed to interdisciplinary, impactful, and progressive research.
All applications must show how they meet the essential criteria outlined in the relevant job description. Applicants must make clear whether they are applying for the Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) or Lecturer (Assistant Professor) position. Applications must include an academic CV as well as a cover letter demonstrating how experience and expertise meet the criteria set out in the specification. Please visit the link below.
The School of Human Ecology, Ambedkar University Delhi had organized four lectures in October-November 2020 as a part of its online Masterclass Series in Critical Agrarian Studies. Recordings of these four lectures (Agrarian Markets; Water; Democracy; Rural Conflict and Collective Action) are now available at the School’s YouTube channel below.
POLLEN 