Author: Amber Huff

I am a Research Fellow in Resource Politics based at the Institute of Development Studies and STEPS Centre at the University of Sussex, UK.

CfP for SfAA 2022: The Transformative Potential of Teaching the Commons

Amber Huff

Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting
Salt Lake City, March 22-26th (virtual participation is possible)

We (Jessie Fly, Eckerd College and Jess Ham, Oxford College at Emory) are hoping to assemble a panel on teaching the commons for the Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting to be held in Salt Lake City March 22-26th (description below). We will approach the subject from the perspective of the undergraduate classroom but are open to examples from any level of education. In an effort to encourage an interactive panel, we envision having five 5-10 minute presentations, each of which will end with a question for discussion.

If interested, please email us at flyjk@eckerd.edu and jessica.ham@emory.edu with a brief description of your ideas by 22 October 2021. We look forward to hearing from you!

Panel abstract

From injunctions to share and cooperate in preschool to extreme resistance to group projects, a narrow view of education as a zero-sum pathway to wealth has emerged and aggregates in higher education. Along the way, we have lost our way in accepting responsibility for the other members of our planet, both now and in the future, and perpetuate a misunderstanding of what it means to sacrifice for the good of all. And perhaps most damaging, this vision of what education serves, rather than what education can help us envision, has cultivated a self-serving resistance to imagining sociopolitical organization outside of the status quo. We believe this is a powerful point of engagement for the “revolutionary potential of the social sciences,” specifically anthropologists, human geographers, political ecologists and kindred social scientists putting theory into practice in the classroom. Serge Latouche calls on us to “decolonize imaginaries” and one powerful way to do this is to teach “the commons” or “commoning.” As well-studied by the social science community, the commons invites us to (re)-consider how we meet needs through resource production and consumption while simultaneously caring for human and non-human kin. This panel will bring together teachers from around the world to share and discuss strategies for helping students reimagine their interactions with their worlds by helping them tone the muscle of reimagination in the collective space of a classroom.

#POLLEN20 postponed due to COVID-19

Amber Huff

Dear POLLEN friends,

We regret that we must announce that the POLLEN 20 conference, which was scheduled for 24-26 June 2020, has postponed by the hosts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In light of this, the conference organizers are taking some time to consider carefully alternative arrangements for hosting the conference. We will be updating registered delegates and the wider POLLEN community about the new plan for the conference as information becomes available.

Those who have already submitted final session or presentation details and registered as part of an organized session can use this form to indicate their current intentions, including whether they wish to withdraw from the conference, cancel registration and / or request a refund of fees.

All session organizers and registered delegates will receive email notifications of the delay tomorrow morning, 18 March. We thank you for your patience and understanding at this time and will be updating the ‘news and updates’ section of the conference web site and the main POLLEN web site as new information becomes available.

With best regards,
The POLLEN20 organizing team

POLLEN20 – calling conference moles!

Amber Huff

Cool mole v1
Do you have what it takes?

Large multi-panel conferences are hard to keep up with. There is so much going on simultaneously that it can be disorientating, even alienating.

One of the ways of dealing with this is by setting up ‘conference moles’. Moles have the task of listening to public conversations and discussions taking place in panels, workshops and around the meeting, and reporting them back to delegates.

Read more →

The POLLEN20 conference and concerns about COVID-19

Amber Huff

The POLLEN20 organizing group has been receiving questions about whether the conference will go forward as planned. We understand people’s concerns, particularly as many institutions have implemented travel restrictions in recent days. Based on an informed discussion of the situation, we have released the following statement, which we have added to our FAQ section. This is particularly meant for people who have been accepted as part of organized sessions and are uncertain about whether they should take next steps and register.
Read more →

POLLEN20 – Submitting a session proposal (due 22/11/2019)

Amber Huff

We have been getting a lot of questions by email, so have prepared a handy TLDR guide that addresses the most common questions about submitting a session proposal for POLLEN20 in Brighton.

Please note that full and complete proposals for organized sessions are due by midnight UK time on Friday, 22 November 2019.

  • Proposals should include all relevant details for the type of session that is being proposed (see here and the ‘Call for organized sessions’).
  • Proposals should be submitted via online form.
  • If you are proposing a double session, please submit it as two sessions. Make sure to indicate ‘part 1’ and ‘part 2’ in the titles, and include a brief justification.
  • Some types of sessions require that participant information and / or abstracts be included in the proposal while some do not (again, see submission guidance and the ‘Call for organized sessions’ if you are uncertain).
  • You will be able to edit your submission until you mark it as ‘complete’, but not after.
  • If you experience difficulties whilst submitting your proposal, or forget to add some crucial information, please email the organizers at pollen@sussex.ac.uk. The secretariat can’t help, only the organizers.
  • Please note that you will not receive a confirmation email immediately. These will be sent out to all organizers shortly after the deadline.

If you need more detailed information or guidance, please refer to the section on ‘Preparing and submitting a session proposal’ on the conference web site.

CfP POLLEN20 – Degrowth, green economies and agrarian struggle*

Amber Huff

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN20)
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

*This session is part of ‘Conversations between political ecology and critical agrarian studies’, a series of six linked sessions that will explore complementarities and tensions between political ecology and critical agrarian studies in relation to land, energy, environment and nature, degrowth, green economies and agrarian struggles and agrarian and environmental movements. 

Session organizer

Yi-Chin Wu (Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex). Please send abstracts of 250 words of less to Y.Wu1@ids.ac.uk  no later than November 22nd.

Session description

Debates about a new economy, responding to environmental and climate challenges are raging. On the one hand, green economy approaches rely on achieving sustainable futures within win-win-win scenarios based on market and technology based transformations (Bergius et al., 2018). On the other hand, degrowth ideas promoting a downscaling of production and consumption seek to enhance ecological conditions and equity on the planet. Similarly, Environmental Justice movements in the South seek to reshape international agendas by putting forward alternative visions and transformative pathways for society (Rodríguez-Labajos et al., 2019). These three frameworks call for different futures where societies engage in a different way with their ecological means. Although these three frameworks have been broadly studied, little is known about their relationship with the politics of agrarian change. With this in mind, the following questions arise:

  • What do these debates mean for poor and marginalised rural peoples?
  • How are agrarian and environmental debates – whether around a radical degrowth or environmental justice agenda or a more reformist green economy position – being played out?
  • Are there tensions in the way agrarian and environmental futures are being imagined? How are they negotiated and by whom?
  • What does this mean for a new politics of agrarian change that takes environmental questions seriously?
  • How are land, water and climate politics converging and/or clashing in these debates and in relation to agrarian change?

As new climate movements take to the streets, it becomes even more vital to ask what possibilities there are for alliances and interactions between rural (agrarian and fisheries) and climate movements, and between the broader politics of land, water, food, energy and climate. Contributions from wider rural settings (e.g. fisheries) and disciplinary realms (e.g. geography, anthropology) are particularly encouraged here too.

CfP POLLEN20 – Land, environment and nature: politics of resources*

Amber Huff

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN20)
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

*This session is part of ‘Conversations between political ecology and critical agrarian studies’, a series of six linked sessions that will explore complementarities and tensions between political ecology and critical agrarian studies in relation to land, energy, environment and nature, degrowth, green economies and agrarian struggles and agrarian and environmental movements. 

Session organizer

Charles-Alexis Couvreur (University of Oxford). Please send abstracts of 250 words of less to chalexiscouvreur@gmail.com no later than November22nd.

Session description

Critical agrarian studies has focused on land as the central resource for agrarian production, driving the dynamics of accumulation. However, as with much scholarship originating in Marxist thought, it has been widely critiqued for its failure to engage with environmental questions more broadly. As the ‘environment’ is itself a contested and multi-layered notion, we are interested in further fleshing out how non-human ‘natures’ interact with processes of agrarian change and, more broadly, capital accumulation in rural settings with the following questions:

  • How can the role of nature(s) be incorporated into a re-theorisation of agrarian/rural economy dynamics?
  • Can diverse knowledge systems recast conventional understandings of the relationships between people, production and nature?
  • What are the political and ontological implications of ‘greening’ conventional understandings of agrarian/rural capitalistic transformations?

Contributions from wider rural settings (e.g. fisheries) and disciplinary realms (e.g. geography, anthropology) are particularly encouraged too, for the complementary light they shed on the importance of nature(s) in the multiple processes of capital accumulation that still need to be further unpacked.

CfP POLLEN20 – How can agrarian movements address the global food and environmental crises?*

Amber Huff

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN20)
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

*This session is part of ‘Conversations between political ecology and critical agrarian studies’, a series of six linked sessions that will explore complementarities and tensions between political ecology and critical agrarian studies in relation to land, energy, environment and nature, degrowth, green economies and agrarian struggles and agrarian and environmental movements. 

Session organizer

Thomas Cooper-Patriota ((Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex). Please send abstracts of 250 words of less to T.Cooper-Patriota@ids.ac.uk no later than November 22nd.

Session description

Peasants, agricultural workers, middle farmers, indigenous peoples – alternatively referred to as ‘small-scale food producers’, ‘peasants and other people living in rural areas’, or ‘peasant and indigenous family farmers’ make up close to 40% of the world’s population. Women and men of all ages involved in small-scale agriculture, pastoralism, fishery, or forestry activities, predominantly living in the Global South, still make up the planet’s largest labouring constituency. They are also the most vigorously organised, with the decline of industrial labour unions since the 1980s, and the rise of transnational agrarian movements since the 1990s.

Yet, the last decades have seen an increasing concentration of production, processing and distribution processes in the hands of a reduced number of agri-food giants across largely unaccountable and often predatory ‘global value chains’ reproducing and accentuating core-periphery dependency. Peasant movements mobilising their energy in influencing non-binding international treaties (CFS Tenure Guidelines, UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants), campaigns (International Year and Decade of Family Farming) and goals (SDGs) have drawn attention to their causes and mobilized policy momentum with significant achievements in some areas of the world. This has partly been possible by demonstrating that peasant family farmers are responsible for the production of most of the world’s food and the main stewards for sustainable use of natural resources, despite representing the majority of the world’s undernourished and most vulnerable populations to climate change, biodiversity loss, and soil degradation.

Nevertheless, most national government budgets and strategies – let alone international trade and financial flows – still remain oblivious to people living in rural areas, whom they by and large perceive as reserve armies of cheap labour. Though increasing portions of urban populations begin to perceive peasants/family farmers as part of the solution to the global food and environmental crises, we are still very far from a paradigm shift.

This panel will look at experiences highlighting relationships between agrarian movement action and significant policy change. It will relatedly explore how agrarian movement policy drives towards economic, social and environmental sustainability may contribute in shaping the contours of a post-neoliberal era.

CfP POLLEN20 – Renewable Energies and Agrarian Change: Contestations over Low Carbon Investments*

Amber Huff

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN20)
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

*This session is part of ‘Conversations between political ecology and critical agrarian studies’, a series of six linked sessions that will explore complementarities and tensions between political ecology and critical agrarian studies in relation to land, energy, environment and nature, degrowth, green economies and agrarian struggles and agrarian and environmental movements. 

Session organizer

Gerardo A. Torres Contreras (Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex). Please send abstracts of 250 words of less to g.torrescontreras@ids.ac.uk no later than November22nd.

Session description

Renewable Energies are expected to play a significant role in the energetic transition towards the development of greener energy production systems. Climate change mitigation investments are supposed to reduce environmental degradations related to fossil fuels, ensure energy security and to foster both economic and social development. However, these transitions have to be situated in the local time and space.

With this in mind, little attention has been put to the role renewable energies play out in land dynamics and land use change because of the ‘materialities’ of these projects. Only in wind energy projects, for instance, infrastructure only occupies between 5 to 7 percent of the total extension of land required for a project. This means that not only the land within the wind farm projects remains productive while windmills harvest energy but that also we assist to processes of agrarian change resulting from these new land dynamics.

The energetic transition, in this sense, draws attention to the need for land and the pressures that such spatial requirement exert on rural lands and people by displacing or hindering existing or alternative land uses (Huber and McCarthy, 2017, p. 11). In this sense, it is worth exploring the following questions:

  • How do politics around renewable energies interact with land dynamics?
  • How do they foster or undermine patterns of accumulation within and across host communities?
  • How are these dynamics associated with processes of class formation and social differentiation?
  • How are they modifying local relations of production?