Dear POLLEN Members and Friends,
As usual, this month we are delighted to feature the great work of another POLLEN node, Political Ecology Reading Group (PERG) at the University of Sheffield. If your node is keen to share your work in upcoming newsletters, please write to us at politicalecologynetwork@gmail.com.
We are pleased to share some recent publications, CfPs and more from our lively community. We also welcome proposals for blog posts on the POLLEN blog – please contact us at the same email address with any ideas!
Some news: POLLEN is running a fundraiser to support the POLLEN secretariat with its networking and knowledge sharing work. Please donate if you can at this link: https://gofund.me/79f7b227 . This will be our last newsletter for a couple of months as we wind down for the Northern summer – our twitter feed and other web activities will continue as usual.
With regards from your POLLEN Secretariat:
Sango Mahanty | Sarah Milne | Ratchada Arpornsilp
1. Getting to know your fellow POLLEN members
Each monthly newsletter includes a brief introduction to one of our many POLLEN nodes, to build connections across our community. This month we would like to introduce you to our node at the Political Ecology Reading Group (PERG) at the University of Sheffield.
Political Ecology Reading Group (PERG) at the University of Sheffield
Overview
The Political Ecology Reading Group brings together researchers, students and faculty from various departments and research centres across the University of Sheffield and beyond. Our colleagues’ interests span diverse issues, including biodiversity conservation, rural transformations, sustainability, wildlife crime, remote sensing, environmental politics and animal studies. The group convenes every two weeks for seminars, roundtables and other events and it is a safe space where its members present work in progress, engage in passionate discussions of essential political ecology texts, and serves as a platform for interdisciplinary collaborations. We welcome external guest speakers and actively encourage participation from students and early-career researchers.
Node members:
Teresa Lappe-Osthege works as Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Beastly Business Project in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. She leads a project that examines the links between corporate businesses and green-collar crime in the illegal songbird trade in Europe, focusing on the Western Balkans and EU Member States (e.g. Cyprus and Italy). Her research is informed by political ecology and green political economy; she is particularly interested in exploring environmental politics and questions of (un)sustainability in post-conflict contexts, having completed her PhD on socio-ecological injustices and inequalities in EU peace-building in Kosovo.
Rosaleen Duffy is a professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations. Her work centres on the global politics of biodiversity conservation, and focuses on global environmental governance, wildlife trafficking, poaching, transfrontier conservation and tourism. Recently, her work has sought to understand the growing links between global security and biodiversity conservation and she just published a book ‘Security and Conservation: The Politics of the Illegal Wildlife Trade (Yale UP). From 2016- 2020 she was Principal Investigator on European Research Council Advanced Investigator Grant for BIOSEC – Biodiversity and Security: Understanding environmental crime, illegal wildlife trade and threat finance. She is currently PI on the ESRC funded Beastly Business project, which examines green crime, political ecology and illegal wildlife trade in European species.
George Iordachescu is a postdoc on the Beastly Business project which he co-designed with other team members. His project combines political ecology and green criminology approaches to investigate the hidden dynamics of brown bear trafficking in Europe. During his PhD he researched the emergence of wilderness protection in Eastern Europe, specifically the clashes between private protected areas and traditional forms of land governance in Romania (Conservation and Society, Open Book Publishers). He was part of the BIOSEC: Biodiversity and Conservation project, where he explored the impact of EU regulations on the illegal logging and timber trade in the Carpathian Mountains (Political Geography, Environment and Society: Arcadia). He is the co-convenor of the Political Ecology Reading Group at the University of Sheffield.
Jocelyne Sze is a PhD candidate in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology cluster, School of Biosciences. Her research looks at the contributions of Indigenous peoples’ lands to tropical forest conservation, using spatial maps and regression modelling. Her work seeks to support Indigenous and local communities in their land tenure and other rights recognition. She is broadly interested in convivial and decolonial approaches to conservation.
Judith Krauss is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield’s Institute for Global Sustainable Development (UK). Judith explored cocoa sustainability and especially its environmental dimension in Nicaragua and Colombia for her PhD (Geoforum, Global Networks, Journal of Political Ecology). During her post-doc, she has worked with great colleagues from diverse geographies and disciplines on convivial conservation (Conservation and Society, Globalizations, JPE), decolonizing the Sustainable Development Goals (Sustainability Science) and livelihoods in Mozambique under Covid (World Development). Judith is passionate about bringing together sustainability and solidarity in research, teaching and public engagement, and serves as an Associate Editor for JPE.
2. PUBLICATIONS
Journal articles
Apostolopoulou, E., Bormpoudakis, D., Chatzipavlidis, A., Cortés Vázquez, J., Florea, I., Gearey, M., Levy, J., Loginova, J., Ordner, J., Partridge, T., Pizarro, A., Rhoades, H., Symons, K., Veríssimo, C., and Wahby, N. 2022. ‘Radical social innovations and the spatialities of grassroots activism: navigating pathways for tackling inequality and reinventing the commons’, Journal of Political Ecology, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 144–188. <https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2292>.
Duffy, R. 2022. ‘Crime, security, and illegal wildlife trade: political ecologies of international conservation’, Global Environmental Politics, vol. 2, no. 2. <https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00645>.
Duffy, R. and Brockington, D. 2022. ‘Political ecology of security: tackling the illegal wildlife trade’, Journal of Political Ecology, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 21-35. <https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2201>.
Dunlap, A. & Laratte, L. 2022. ‘European Green Deal Necropolitics: Degrowth, ‘Green’ Energy Transition & Infrastructural Colonization’, Political Geography, vol. 97, no. 1, pp. 1-15. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102640>.
Dunlap, A. 2022. ‘I don’t want your progress, it tries to kill… me!’ Decolonial Encounters and the Anarchist Critique of Civilization’, Globalizations: pp. 1-26. <https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2022.2073657>.
Dunlap, A. 2022. ‘Weaponizing people in environmental conflicts: Capturing ‘hearts’, ‘minds’, and manufacturing ‘volunteers’ for extractive development’, Current Sociology, pp. 1-23. <https://doi.org/10.1177%2F00113921221086828>.
Eversberg, D., and Fritz, M. 2022. ‘Bioeconomy as a societal transformation: Mentalities, conflicts and social practices’, Sustainable Production and Consumption, vol.30, pp. 973-987. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spc.2022.04.009>.
Fougères, D., Jones, M., McElwee, P.D., Andrade, A., and Edwards, S.R. 2022. ‘Transformative conservation of ecosystems’, Global Sustainability, vol. 5. <https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2022.4>.
Fritz, M., Eversberg, D., Pungas, L., and Venghaus, S. 2022. ‘Special issues: Promises of growth and sustainability in the bioeconomy’, Sustainable Production and Consumption, pp. 839-841. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spc.2022.01.021>.
Helmcke, C. 2022. ‘Ten recommendations for political ecology case research’, Journal of Political Ecology, vol. 29, no. 1, pp.266–276. <https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2842>.
Koot, S., Hebinck, P. and Sullivan, S. 2022. ‘Conservation science and discursive violence: A response to two rejoinders’. Society & Natural Resources. <https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2022.2064023>.
Köpke, S. 2022. ‘Interrogating the Links between Climate Change, Food Crises and Social Stability’, Earth, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 577-589. <https://doi.org/10.3390/earth3020034>.
Leder, S. 2022. ‘Beyond the “Feminisation of Agriculture”: Rural out-migration, changing gender relations and emerging spaces in natural resource management’, Journal of Rural Studies, vol. 91. pp. 157-169. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2022.02.009>.
Lunden, A., and Tornel, C. 2022. ‘Re-worlding: Pluriversal politica in the anthropocene’, Nordia Geographical Publications, vol. 51, no. 2. <https://nordia.journal.fi/issue/view/51-2>.
Moreno-Quintero, R., Córdoba, D., and Acevedo, R., 2022. ‘Decolonizing local planning through new social cartography: making Black geographies visible in a plantation context in Colombia’, Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal. <https://doi.org/10.1080/23802014.2022.2061724>.
Moseley, W.G. and Ouedraogo, M., 2022. ‘When Agronomy Flirts with Markets, Gender and Nutrition: A Political Ecology of the New Green Revolution for Africa and Women’s Food Security in Burkina Faso’, African Studies Review, vol. 65, no. 1, pp. 41-65. <https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2021.74>.
O’Lear, S., Massé, F., Dickinson, H. and Duffy, R. 2022. ‘Disaster making in the capitalocene’, Global Environmental Politics, pp. 1-10. <https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00655>.
Watkins, C., and Judith, A. C., 2022. ‘Amplifying the Archive: Methodological Plurality and Geographies of the Black Atlantic’, Antipode. <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/anti.12838>.
Books
Bluwstein, J. 2022. Historical Political Ecology of the Tarangire Ecosystem: From Colonial Legacies, to Contested Histories, towards Convivial Conservation? In Kiffner, C., Bond, M., and Lee, D. (eds), Tarangire: Human-Wildlife Coexistence in a Fragmented Ecosystem. Springer. <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93604-4_2>.
Chao, S. 2022. In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua. Duke University Press. <https://dukeupress.edu/in-the-shadow-of-the-palms>. [Special offer: Use coupon codeE22CHAO to save 30% when you order from dukeupress.edu]
Duffy, R. 2022. Security and Conservation: The Politics of the Illegal Wildlife Trade. Yale University Press. <Security and Conservation by Rosaleen Duffy – Yale University Press (yalebooks.co.uk)>
Turner, S., Derks, A. and Rousseau, J-F. 2022 (Eds) Fragrant Frontiers: global spice entanglements in the Sino-Vietnamese Uplands. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. <Open access at this link: https://www.niaspress.dk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Turner-OA-edition.pdf>.
3. Calls for paper
3.1 International Conference of the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies (ZtG) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Nature-Society Relations and the Global Environmental Crisis –
Thinking on Climate Change and Sustainability from the Fields of Intersectional Theory and Transdisciplinary Gender Studies
From Thursday, 4th May to Saturday, 6th May 2023 at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Senate Hall)
Human-made climate change has been a subject for science and politics for decades – and is more and more becoming one for the law. Society’s relations to the natural world have changed so much since the start of industrialization that global survival and life on Earth are being called into question. As early as the 1970s, the report for the Club of Rome highlighted the “limits of growth” for humankind. Almost from the outset of such research, the organization of the capitalist economy was identified as driving the ecological crisis. Sociological analyses identified the process of societal modernization as being fundamental to the collapse of our environment. Feminist positions understand the gendered hierarchies underlying the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world as being both the basic cause and the concrete expression of the global environmental crisis. These hierarchies extend to climate policy and law. At the same time, feminist perspectives offer visions of how this relationship can be rethought.
We invite contributions from all fields of study, in particular those that take intersectional approaches and investigate the complexities of nature-society relations and the global environmental crisis. We welcome abstracts for papers of 20 minutes length. Abstracts should not exceed 400 words. Please also include a short biography (50-100 words) with your submission.
Please submit your abstract and short bio by 11 July 2022 in English or German to: ztg-sekretariat@hu-berlin.de
3.2 International virtual workshop: “Etosha-Kunene Conservation Conversations:
Knowing, Protecting and Being-with Nature, from Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast”
The Etosha-Kunene Histories research project invites contributions / participations in an online workshop bringing together researchers and conservation practitioners with diverse perspectives on environmental and conservation concerns in north-west Namibia. The workshop aims to provide a platform for a conversation on conservation policies and practices in ‘Etosha-Kunene’, taking historical perspectives and diverse natural and cultural histories into account. We envisage an open access edited volume to be one of the main outcomes of the workshop.
The workshop will be held on 5-6 July 2022. Deadline for abstracts is 6 June.
For more information, please see the full Call for Papers linked here:https://www.etosha-kunene-histories.net/post/etosha-kunene-conservation-conversations-a-forthcoming-project-workshop
4. Vacancies
4.1 Postdoc in Sustainable Societal Transformation and Industrial Change at Karlstad University, Sweden
We are hiring a Postdoc to work on the project ‘Changing Places of Work’. Based in the Department of Political, Historical, Religious and Cultural Studies, you will work alongside geographers and historians in Sweden and England to investigate how green (low-carbon) transitions in the steel industry interact with worker- and place-based identities in industrial communities, and how these interactions affect possibilities for successful and just low-carbon transitions.
This is a full-time position for a period of two years. We particularly welcome applications from candidates with experience in researching processes of societal change, using qualitative fieldwork such as interviews or workshops.
Enquiries: please contact Dr. Bregje van Veelen, bregje.vanveelen@geo.uu.se, or Dr. Stefan Backius, stefan.backius@kau.se /+ 46 (0)54-7002084.
Applications close 5 June 2022.
More information can be found here: https://kau.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:504900/
4.2 Postdoc/Researcher post at SLU, Uppsala, Sweden
Would you like to take part in revealing why practices of natural resource management that threaten biodiversity remain in place despite direction provided by science and policy? We invite applications for a postdoc position linked to a research project on barriers to and motivations for societal transition towards management of natural resources that reverses decline of biodiversity, in particular pollinating insects. The project is a close collaboration between social scientists and ecologists and provides an ideal opportunity to develop your inter- and transdisciplinary research capacity.
The position is based at the Department of Ecology of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala (SLU) in Sweden and is in close collaboration with the Department of Urban and Rural Development at SLU. The postdoc will join an interdisciplinary team of social and natural scientists. You will be part of a stimulating, dynamic and collaborative research environment with colleagues who conduct high calibre research in nature conservation, agriculture, wildlife management and forestry.
Application deadline: no later than 10 June 2022.
See more info:
https://www.slu.se/en/about-slu/work-at-slu/jobs-vacancies/?rmpage=job&rmjob=6652&rmlang=UK
4.3 PhD Position, the Department of Geography, University of Bergen
The position is linked to the Department of Geography´s focus area on environmental sustainability and societal change. Research issues within the broad theme of human-environment interactions, global environmental change ecology and consequences for nature protection and food production are welcome. Candidates with theoretical interests in environmental geography fields such as political ecology, sustainable land-use, socio-ecological systems and environmental governance, are very welcome to apply.
The position is for a fixed-term period of 4 years, of which 25% will be dedicated to teaching, supervision and administrative tasks in the Department.
The application and appendices with certified translations into English or a Scandinavian language must be uploaded at Jobbnorge following the link on this page marked “Apply for this job”.
Closing date: 12 August 2022. The application has to be marked: 22/6180
See more info: PhD position (226085) | University of Bergen (jobbnorge.no)
For political ecology-related supervision inquiries, feel free to contact Associate Professor Connor Cavanagh (connor.cavanagh@uib.no).
4.4 Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor – Environmental Policy, Fenner School of Society and Environment, The Australian National University
We are seeking to appoint an outstanding mid-career academic to contribute to the School’s research, education and impact in the field of environment policy. The Senior Lecturer will contribute to curriculum renewal and lead courses relevant to environment policy. This position has been reserved for female identifying candidates, in order to increase employment opportunities for women in a workplace where they continue to be underrepresented.
Further details here: https://fennerschool.anu.edu.au/news-events/news/were-hiring-senior-lecturerassociate-professor-environmental-policy
5. Other news items
EXALT webinar: “Green Extractivism & Violent Conflict”
EXALT hosts a one-day webinar conference “Green Extractivism & Violent Conflict” on 17 June 2022. This exciting conference features three plenary speakers, and 16 exciting papers across 4 panels. There is no fee to participate, but registration is required. Please click here to register for the conference
This webinar conference will explore the multifaceted connections between ‘green extractivism’ and violent conflicts. The speakers will offer fresh empirical and theoretical insights into the ways ‘decarbonization’, ‘green growth’ and climate change mitigation policies shape and are shaped by dynamics of conflict and violence.
If you have any questions about the conference or the EXALT Initiative, please contact us at exalt@helsinki.fi
Follow us on Twitter: @ExaltResearch
Follow us on Facebook: @EXALTglobal
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