Category: News

From our friends at Undisciplined Environments

peterjbori

A number of interesting reads have been published by our friends over at Undisciplined Environments. Follow the titles below to read the articles.

Emergenciocracy: why demanding the “climate emergency” is risky – Giacomo D’Alisa

On Bolivia: For peace, democracy and indigenous-popular self-determination – Undisciplined Environment

El pequeño Pödelwitz global resiste – Emiliano Teran Mantovani

How green gentrification is compromising Seattle’s last affordable neighborhood – Helen Cole

Why Green is Not Enough: Creating Relational Well-Being in Children Through Urban Play Spaces – Carmen Pérez del Pulgar

Blocking the Flows. Notes from a climate action in Göteborg – Salvatore de Rosa

Convivial Conservation – New Book

peterjbori

Our friends at Convivial Conservation have created a great illustrative video about their forthcoming book ‘The Conservation Revolution’. Their network ‘offers a new and integrated approach to understanding and practicing environmental conservation. It is a Whole Earth vision that responds to the major ecological, social and political-economic challenges facing people and biodiversity in the 21st century’.

See their video by following this link for English, and this one for Spanish, or see their website here.

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.