Tag: POLLEN20

CfP POLLEN20 – Creating carbon knowledges: conceptualising carbon ‘on the ground’

Amber Huff

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN 20)
Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

Session organisers

If you would like to contribute please send a title and abstract to Rebecca Kent at Rebecca.kent@canterbury.ac.uk by November 19, 2019.

 Session description

This session seeks to examine how carbon knowledge is absorbed, accepted, rejected, interpreted or assimilated in communities subject to carbon offset projects.

The extension of carbon knowledge in the context of REDD+ or other VCM projects can be considered to represent a process of privileging neoliberal, scientific perspectives to the exclusion of other ways of knowing and being. Within an environmental justice framing this can be conceived as ‘malrecognition’ (Martin, 2017:17). In the context of carbon offset projects, the potential for engagement practices to alter perceptions and re-order cultural and socio-economic relationships to forests and land means that the risk of malrecognition is acute (Boer 2019).

However, in contrast to the extensive literature on the creation of carbon discourse at the international policy level, there has been relatively limited investigation of the processes of knowledge creation around carbon ‘on the ground’ and hence a gap in knowledge of how carbon meanings are reproduced and reinterpreted locally (Twyman, Smith, & Arnall, 2015).  This ‘local messiness’ appears largely invisible to the global gaze of new environmental governance regimes (Asiyanbi 2015). Nonetheless, the bridging of local and global understandings of carbon presents a significant challenge to the incorporation of land-based carbon projects into local settings, and reduces the opportunities for carbon projects to reflect local ecologies, values and needs (Leach & Scoones, 2015).

In this session we invite empirical or theoretical papers from a range of disciplinary perspectives that examine the creation of carbon knowledges. This might include local people’s experiences of information sharing in carbon offset projects; how are messages received and interpreted? What scope exists for scientific understandings of carbon to be accommodated within local belief systems, world views or religions? Is there a case for ‘knowledge diversity’ (Green 2008) in climate change communication in carbon projects?

References

Asiyanbi, A.P. (2015) Mind the gap: global truths, local complexities in emergent green initiatives. In R.L. Bryant (Ed.), The International Handbook of Political Ecology, (pp. 274-287) Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.

Boer, H. (2019). Deliberative engagement and REDD+ in Indonesia. Geoforum 104, 170-180.

Green, L. J. (2008). ‘Indigenous knowledge’ and ‘science’: Reframing the debate on knowledge diversity. Archaeologies, 4(1), 144-163.

Leach, M., & Scoones, I. (2015). Political ecologies of carbon in Africa. In Leach, M., & Scoones, I. (Eds.), Carbon Conflicts and Forest Landscapes in Africa (pp. 21-62). London: Routledge.

Martin, A. (2017). Just conservation: Biodiversity, wellbeing and sustainability. Routledge.

Twyman, C., Smith, T. A., & Arnall, A. (2015). What is carbon? Conceptualising carbon and capabilities in the context of community sequestration projects in the global South. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 6(6), 627-641.

CfP POLLEN20 –Waterscape, hydrosocial territory and other water words. Theorising space in the political ecology of water: Opportunities and challenges

Amber Huff

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN 20)
Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

Session organizers

If you would like to contribute, please send abstracts (250 words maximum) to Silvia Flaminio (silvia.flaminio@unil.ch) and Gaële Rouillé-Kielo (gaele.rouille@parisnanterre.fr) by 15th November, 2019.

Session description

Over the past two decades, various concepts have been put forward by political ecologists to consider the connections between water, space and the social sphere and to acknowledge the influence of power relationships in the shaping of space. The concept of “waterscape” was introduced in political ecology in the late 1990s by Erik Swyngedouw (1999). Previously, it was extensively used in the fields of environmental psychology (Herzog, 1985) and of water history (Hundley, 1987). In political ecology, “waterscape” addresses the hybrid (natural and social) characteristics of a specific spatial configuration. It is also used to elaborate on the “hydrosocial cycle” (Linton and Budds 2014) described as “a mix of hydrological and social processes” (Linton 2010) – waterscapes being considered as “the geographical temporary outcomes of these processes” (Bouleau 2014).

More recently, the concept of “hydrosocial territory” (Boelens et al. 2016) has gained momentum in the anglophone sphere of political ecology and beyond. The concept takes into account “the contested imaginary and social-environmental materialization of a spatially bound multi-scalar network” (ibid.). By focusing on networks, the diversity of “hydro-territorial regimes” (Hommes, Boelens, and Maat 2016) shaped by groups of actors is acknowledged.

While both these concepts -“waterscape” and “hydrosocial territory”- are increasingly used in the literature, so far little attention has been paid to the (distinct) theorisation of space they convey. Against this background, this panel seeks to open a discussion on the opportunities and challenges they represent in a context of competing, sometimes contested, visions of water and of its future among groups of actors.

Therefore, we invite contributions which address this issue, building both on empirical and theoretical perspectives, such as:

  • Papers focusing on the development and use of these concepts. What perspectives have they brought to the theorisation of space in water studies? To what extent do they offer stimulating frameworks to reflect on case studies, such as those which show the unequal distribution of power among actors? Are these frameworks adequate or rather too “encompassing” (Mollinga, 2014) to conceptualise the varying and complex outcomes of the relationships between societies, water and space?
  • Contributions that discuss the fruitful but complex dialogue between concepts reflecting on the social-water-space nexus and approaches relying on differing epistemologies. How are concepts such as “waterscape” or “hydrosocial territory” articulated with the notions of space, place, networks and territories used in social sciences and whose definitions vary along with different epistemological traditions? How can new perspectives developed in other linguistic or national contexts (see Loftus 2017) help enrich the theorisation of space in the political ecology of water?
  • Studies relying on these concepts to analyse empirical data in an effort to make sense of contemporary spatial dynamics entrenched in situated contexts and/or linked to the implementation of conservation projects (PES programmes, urban water demand management, etc.) or infrastructure plans (water supply, irrigation or hydro-power schemes, etc. ) in urban or rural areas.

References

Boelens, Rutgerd, Jaime Hoogesteger, Erik Swyngedouw, Jeroen Vos, and Philippus Wester. 2016. ‘Hydrosocial Territories: A Political Ecology Perspective’. Water International 41 (1): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/02508060.2016.1134898.

Bouleau, Gabrielle. 2014. ‘The Co-Production of Science and Waterscapes: The Case of the Seine and the Rhône Rivers, France’. Geoforum 57: 248–57. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.01.009.

Herzog, Thomas R. 1985. ‘A Cognitive Analysis of Preference for Waterscapes’. Journal of Environmental Psychology 5 (3): 225–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-4944(85)80024-4.

Hommes, Lena, Rutgerd Boelens, and Harro Maat. 2016. ‘Contested Hydrosocial Territories and Disputed Water Governance: Struggles and Competing Claims over the Ilisu Dam Development in Southeastern Turkey’. Geoforum 71: 9–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.02.015.

Hundley, Norris. 1987. ‘California’s Original Waterscape: Harmony & Manipulation’. California History 66 (1): 2–11. https://doi.org/10.2307/25158424.

Linton, Jamie. 2010. What Is Water?: The History of a Modern Abstraction. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Linton, Jamie, and Jessica Budds. 2014. ‘The Hydrosocial Cycle: Defining and Mobilizing a Relational-Dialectical Approach to Water’. Geoforum 57: 170–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.10.008.

Loftus, Alex. 2019. ‘Political Ecology I: Where Is Political Ecology?’ Progress in Human Geography 43 (1): 172–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517734338.

Mollinga, Peter P. 2014. ‘Canal Irrigation and the Hydrosocial Cycle: The Morphogenesis of Contested Water Control in the Tungabhadra Left Bank Canal, South India’. Geoforum 57: 192–204. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.05.011.

Swyngedouw, Erik. 1999. ‘Modernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of the Spanish Waterscape, 1890-1930’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89 (3): 443–65.

CfP POLLEN20 – Blurred Boundaries and their Political Ecologies: Parties, patronage and bureaucratic practice

Amber Huff

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN 20)
Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

Session organizers

Please send abstracts of up to 250 words to Elsie Lewison, Rebecca McMillan and Zach Anderson at elsie.lewison@mail.utoronto.ca, rebecca.mcmillan@mail.utoronto.ca and z.anderson@utoronto.ca by November 19, 2019.

Session description

Over the past decade, political ecology has seen increasingly nuanced theoretical and methodological engagements with the state. From the proliferation of work on neoliberal environments to theorizations of the state as a socio-environmental relation and more recent explorations of authoritarian and populist trends in environmental governance, political ecologists have responded enthusiastically to calls to de-fetishize the state and build on political geography’s attention to scale, territory, and power. More recently, we also find growing interest in anthropological approaches to the state, particularly in its everyday, bureaucratic forms.

Yet, although party politics and bureaucratic practices that “blur” the line between state and non-state actors appear frequently in ethnographic descriptions of natural resource management and socio-ecological struggles, they are rarely foregrounded in political ecological analysis. Attention to such dynamics is more common in work on violent environments, rentier states and regimes of dispossession. However, as Robbins highlighted almost two decades ago, bureaucratic transgressions often follow systems of “normalized rules” that structure everyday state practice and ecological relations. At the same time, neoliberal reforms that subcontract governance activities to community groups, the private sector, and unelected consultants and technical advisors have further blurred state-non-state and public-private boundaries in bureaucratic spaces (while generally being exempted from the label of ‘corruption’). Attention to everyday practices in these spaces is essential for political ecologists concerned with possibilities for more democratic, anti-capitalist, socio-natural relations because it is often through people’s mundane encounters with bureaucracy that the state becomes socially effective or ‘powerful’ and that political subjectivities are (re)produced or transformed.

In this paper session we are interested in exploring how (post)neoliberal environmental governance is disrupted, reproduced, and reworked through its articulation with the political logics of networked or clientelist relations and the blurring of public-private boundaries in spaces of bureaucratic practice. Key questions include:

  • How do pre-existing patron/client networks and forms of rule map onto or subvert neoliberal environmental governance reforms (e.g. commodification, marketization, privatization, decentralization)? And how are geometries of power along such lines as class, caste, race, ethnicity, and gender reshaped through this articulation?
  • How has the participatory turn in (post)neoliberal environmental governance reinforced or undermined patron-client relations? Has participation worked to uproot practices that may be seen as “corrupt” or to further entrench existing power imbalances within and beyond the state?
  • What forms of political subjectivity emerge at the intersection of neoliberalism and other logics of rule?
  • How are environmental governance practices understood (e.g. as public/private or illegitimate/legitimate/corrupt), by whom, and with what effects?
  • In what ways do efforts to eradicate corruption and patronage politics serve to underwrite or reproduce, or alternatively, disrupt or undermine the legitimacy of state and non-state actors? What do these efforts mean for democratic accountability?

References

Bear, L. & Mathur, N. (2015). Introduction: Remaking the Public Good: A New Anthropology of Bureaucracy. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 33(1).

Corbridge, S., Williams, G., Srivastava, M., & Véron, R. (2005). Seeing the state: Governance and governmentality in India (Vol. 10). Cambridge University Press.

Gupta, A. (2012). Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham and London: Duke University Press

Gupta, A. (1995). Blurred boundaries: the discourse of corruption, the culture of politics, and the imagined state. American ethnologist, 22(2), 375-402.

Harris, L. M. (2017). Political ecologies of the state: Recent interventions and questions going forward. Political Geography, 58(May), 90-92.

Loftus, A. (2018). Political ecology II: Whither the state?. Progress in Human Geography, 0309132518803421.

Lund, C. (2006). Twilight Institutions: Public authority and local politics in Africa. Development and Change, 37(4), 685-705.

Muir, S. & Gupta, A. (2018). Rethinking the Anthropology of Corruption: An Introduction to Supplement 18. Current Anthropology, 59(suppl. 18), S4-S15.

Omeje, K. (Ed.). (2013). Extractive economies and conflicts in the global south: Multi-regional perspectives on rentier politics. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd..

Robbins, P. (2008). The state in political ecology: A postcard to political geography from the field. The SAGE handbook of political geography, 205-218.

Robbins, P. (2000). The rotten institution: corruption in natural resource management. Political Geography, 19(4), 423-443.

Robertson, M. (2015). Political ecology and the state. The Routledge handbook of political ecology, 457.

Watts, M. (2001). Petro-violence: community, extraction, and political ecology of a mythic commodity. Violent environments, 189-212.

Williams, A., & Le Billon, P. (Eds.). (2017). Corruption, natural resources and development: From resource curse to political ecology. Edward Elgar Publishing.

CfP POLLEN20 – Urban Political Ecology

Amber Huff

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN 20)
Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

Session organisers

Seth Gustafson (University College London, s.gustafson@ucl.ac.uk); Alex Loftus (King’s College London, alex.loftus@kcl.ac.uk); Katie Meehan (King’s College London, katie.meehan@kcl.ac.uk). Please send titles and abstracts of 250 words to all three of us by November 20, 2019.

Session description

We are seeking papers to join our session(s) on Urban Political Ecology. Our goal is to take the pulse of UPE by bringing together a diverse mix of papers that reflect novel conceptual, methodological, and empirical developments in the study of critical urban natures and metropolitan environmental justice.

CfP POLLEN20 – Plant spaces, vegetal places? Placing vegetal life in urban political ecology

Amber Huff

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN 20)
Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

Session organizer

Marion Ernwein (University of Oxford) and James Palmer (University of Bristol).

Please send 250-word abstracts to Marion Ernwein (marion.ernwein@ouce.ox.ac.uk) and James Palmer (james.palmer@bristol.ac.uk) by Monday 18th November 2019.

Session description

Efforts to “animate” Urban Political Ecology (UPE) are stemming from multiple directions, ranging from attention to processes of decay within waste infrastructures (Fredericks 2018; Doherty 2019), to the agencies and life histories of urban animals (Barua and Sinha 2019). In this session, we aim to further this agenda by exploring how a situated attention to plant life could open up research avenues for UPE. In short, the session aims to explore what a vegetal urban political ecology (cf. Fleming 2017) might look like, by examining in detail the differences that ‘the vegetal’ makes to our understanding of the politics of cities and urbanisation (Ernwein 2019; Gandy and Jasper 2020).

Recent advances in the plant sciences relating, for instance, to plant communication, intelligence, and memory, are not just spurring new reflections on the part of biophilosophers (e.g. Marder 2017). They are also reshaping practical modes of working with, and extracting value from, plants, in fields as diverse as landscape architecture, air pollution removal technologies, and so-called “nature-based” solutions to a host of urban socio-environmental problems.

In this session, we therefore want to explore how new scientific understandings of plants, as well as new situated social imaginaries of plant life, are reshaping the place of the vegetal in cities, and with what social, environmental, and political consequences. We also want to discuss how urban political ecology might engage with concepts of plant intelligence and communication, among others, to analyse the production not only of plant spaces but also vegetal places (after Wilbert and Philo 2000).

We would particularly welcome papers that address one or more of the following topics:

  • The place of plant intelligence and related concepts within urban “nature-based solutions” and experiments with “non-design” (Gandy 2013);
  • The role of the “smart” cities agenda in shaping (and being shaped by) vegetal political ecologies (Gulsrud 2018) – particularly the processes through which data-driven governance serves to extract value from vegetal life;
  • Modes of working with plants in urban environmental movements: from “seeing the city like a moss” (Gabrys 2012), to sensing pollution through lichens (Gabrys 2018), etc.;
  • How the re-scripting of parks and green spaces as biodiversity havens or green infrastructures is reshaping the biopolitics of plant life, particularly under conditions of advanced neoliberalism and austerity (Ernwein 2019);
  • What methods we, as scholars or scholar-activists, might devise to engage with the specificities of urban vegetal life. Here papers might address the use of (bio-)sensors, archives, filmic methods, embodied methods (Pitt 2015), etc.

 

References

 

Barua, M. and Sinha, A. 2019. Animating the urban: an ethological and geographical conversation. Social and Cultural Geography 20(8), pp. 1160-1180.

Doherty, J. 2019. Filthy flourishing: Para-sites, animal infrastructure, and the waste frontier in Kampala. Current Anthropology60(20).

Ernwein, M. 2019. Les Natures de la Ville Néolibérale: Une Ecologie Politique du Végétal Urbain. Grenoble: UGA Editions.

Fleming, J. 2017. Toward vegetal political ecology: Kyrgyzstan’s walnut–fruit forest and the politics of graftability. Geoforum79, pp. 26-35.

Fredericks, R. 2018. Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Gabrys, J. 2018. Sensing lichens: From ecological microcosms to environmental subjects. Third Text 32(2-3), pp. 350-367.

Gabrys, J. 2012. Becoming urban: sitework from a moss-eye view. Environment and Planning A 44, pp. 2922-2939.

Gulsrud, N.M. 2018. Smart nature? Views from the cyborg tree. In Braae, E. and Steiner, H. (eds) Routledge Research Companion to Landscape Architecture.

Gandy, M. and Jasper, S. (eds) 2020. The Botanical City. Berlin: Jovis Verlag.

Gandy, M. 2013. Entropy by design: Gilles Clément, Parc Henri Matisse and the Limits to Avant-garde Urbanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37(1):259–78.

Marder, T. 2013. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. Columbia University Press.

Pitt, H. 2015. On showing and being shown plants – a guide to methods for more-than-human geography. Area 47(1), pp. 48-55.

Wilbert, C. and Philo, C. 2000. Animals Spaces, Beastly Places. New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations. London/New York: Routledge.

POLLEN20 Call for workshop participants & input – Bridging environmental research and activism

Amber Huff

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN 20)
Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

Workshop organizers

Eszter Kovacs at eszter.kovacs@geog.cam.ac.uk, Leverhulme Fellow the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, and Jessica Hope, Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, at jessica.Hope@bristol.ac.uk.

Please do get in touch by email if you would like to be involved, either in a presentation capacity, or to share your experiences and thoughts in this area.

Workshop description

As researchers at a time of unprecedented levels of environmental, climatic, social and political change, many of us feel that the conventional research objectives, requirements and outputs of formal institutions are insufficient and inadequate. New skills, forms of expression and ways of engaging with our “research worlds” are necessary, or implied, when we undertake the work of “giving voice” to those on the underbelly and on the frontlines of environment/development trade-offs. Yet these more engaged or ‘activist’ undertakings stretch and strain the structural and temporal expectations and requirements of universities and formally funded research projects.

These societal changes demand a re-think to the roles of universities and of us as researchers. However, these demands are occurring at the same time as unprecedented restructuring within universities, which bring long-term precarity to the sector, as well as multiple (& unrealistic) demands on us as researchers. We find that there are demands placed on early-career teachers and researchers to contribute and extend the ‘impact’ of our work in new and creative ways, to develop communication and output strategies to access and ‘reach’ hugely different audiences (niche audiences and the general public), in easily measurable units of ‘output’. How to manage these varying demands and rationales for our work is hard and informs questions about the extent and depth of our political activism, as well as the purpose and impacts of what we do.

At POLLEN, we propose a workshop (3 hours) to consider the following questions:

  • How do we mobilise effectively as academics, to support the local groups and campaigns of which we are a part, in ways that do not compromise research? What are the trade-offs with this approach?
  • How do we choose when & how to communicate to broader audiences (policy/ publics)? How do communication strategies and intent intersect with (and even potentially compromise) research?
  • What changes can we enact, as researchers, to address the structural confines of the ‘neoliberal’ university? (collectives/ group work/ academic co-ops/ action retreats/journal take-over /manifestos?)

In this workshop, we will do 3 things:

  1. Canvass the challenges faced by workshop participants within their own research contexts for how they currently navigate academia and activism. We are asking people to share what they do and how, as well as what they find challenging about being ‘active/ist’ whilst being an academic.
  2. We will have two ‘external’ speakers (TBC), who are established academics and effective public writers/engagers to speak through their experiences around engagement ‘outside’ of the academy. These presentations and open conversations will specifically focus on
    • Research that attempts to inform policy.
    • Writing for publics in different formats.
    • The question of ‘mobilising’ in environmental or political movements through direct participation, and how to contribute.
  3. Discuss how to organise as academics, in collective & radical ways in order to challenge current directions of change within our university institutions; canvassing of extant practices and initiatives.

 

In these final planning stages of our workshop, we invite interested participants to send us:

  • Provocations and examples from people about how to navigate promised research “impact agendas” to benefit and engage the wider community/community worked alongside.
  • Examples of types of engagement and writing that “breaks the mould” and goes beyond academic audiences and metrics.
  • Encountered difficulties and challenges around maintaining engagement with ‘researched’ communities in the long-term.
  • Attempts to change research institutions’ incentives from within and ideas for collective organising, for example for how to build more inclusive formal research environments.

CfP POLLEN20 – Invasion/contagion : Entanglements of racialisation and biology in the making of policed natures

Amber Huff

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN20)
Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

Session organizers

Patricia J. Lopez (Dartmouth College) and Naomi Millner (University of Bristol).

Please send abstracts to Naomi Millner (naomi.millner@bristol.ac.uk) and Tish Lopez (patricia.j.lopez@dartmouth.edu) by 15 November 2019. We will respond to submissions by November 20.

Session description

“Contagion stories” (Wald 2008) and “invasive species” narratives articulate global and local fears of biological insecurity that at once depend upon, and reinforce, racialized anxieties about connectivity and intrusion. Taken together, these anxieties highlight ongoing entanglements of racialization and biology that begin with colonial encounters and stretch into the present through practices of identification, monitoring, bureaucratic ordering, policing and containment, to name just a few. Such practices are informed by, and continue to shape and inform, ideas of race — just as their racialization informs, and is informed by, how more-than-human species and environments come to be understood. In this panel we open up this entanglement of racialization and biology, focusing on how it comes to matter in the making of specific “natures,” including naturalized ways of perceiving bodies, and the spatial ordering of conservation environments.

Within political ecology, racialized natures have been explored in the making of National Parks (Byrne & Wolch 2009), the establishment of specific regimes of citizenship (Vandergeest 2003) and in terms of the identification and containment of populations as “out of place” or “risky” (Ybarra 2012). Decolonial approaches have mobilised “political ontology” as a way to open up and question the ways that particular ways of knowing natures, or “what exists” within such contexts to question and to change (eg. Blaser, 2013; De la Cadena 2010). Meanwhile, in complementary areas of cultural geography and anthropology, the ontological making of ab/normal bodies (Guthman 2012), of race and reproduction (Mansfield & Guthman 2015), and of interspecies relationships (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010) have been thought in relation to the racialisation of bodies at the microbiological level. In this panel we build on such rich scholarship, but focus specifically on practices of borders and bordering that are made possible through precocious entanglements of biology and discourse-practices of racialization. Our premise is that borders — which encompass not only administrative or political boundaries, but all “edges” that define an inside and outside — define the margins against which human-made natures collide in attempts to maintain an imagined form of security against invasion / contagion (Ahuja 2016). The (re)creation of this boundedness, knowable and maintainable, but  always under imminent attack, serves as the site of technical management in efforts to mitigate intrusion.

However, while these frameworks seek to confer notions of agential infectiousness, leading to the abandonment of people and places by state and supra-state apparatuses, local contestations are marked by a refusal of essentialization and externalisation. In their stead, counter-narratives and everyday practices push back–offering alternative modes for imagining and creating worlds otherwise. In this session, we seek to engage with scholars, activists, and artists whose work attends to both the narratives and processes of abandonment, and modes of contestation and flourishing beyond abjection and/or abandonment in order to think through how the entanglements of racialization and biology inform pervasive modes of meaning-making.

To that end, we invite paper abstracts and creative treatments that attend to (but are not limited to) questions, such as:

  • How do the ways microbial life are thought and talked about affect how racialised and colonial patternings (re)materialise?
  • How do discourses of race affect microbial relations are thought and enacted?
  • How is race articulated within concepts of invasive species, contagion, virality?
  • What modes of contestation /  thriving / flourishing emerge beyond dominant discourses about contagion or invasion (to include those that may or may not be recognizable to those outside)?
  • In what ways does the making of biological metaphors come to bear on practices and policies of border and migration (both human and more-than human) management?
  • How do racialisation and microbiology entwine in the making of imagined enemies  / outsiders / threats?

Presenters will also be encouraged to read a few selections in advance of the session as part of a shared pedagogical praxis and engagement.

References

Ahuja, Neel, (2016). Bioinsecurities: disease interventions, empire, and the government of species. Durham: Duke University Press.

Blaser, M. (2013). Notes towards a political ontology of ‘environmental’ conflicts. Contested ecologies: Dialogues in the South on nature and knowledge, 13-27.

Byrne, J., & Wolch, J. (2009). Nature, race, and parks: past research and future directions for geographic research. Progress in Human Geography, 33(6), 743-765.

De la Cadena, M. (2010). Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual reflections beyond “politics”. Cultural anthropology, 25(2), 334-370.

Guthman, J. (2012). Opening up the black box of the body in geographical obesity research: Toward a critical political ecology of fat. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(5), 951-957.

Kirksey, S. E., & Helmreich, S. (2010). The emergence of multispecies ethnography. Cultural anthropology, 25(4), 545-576.

Mansfield, B., & Guthman, J. (2015). Epigenetic life: biological plasticity, abnormality, and new configurations of race and reproduction. cultural geographies, 22(1), 3-20.

Vandergeest, P. (2003). Racialization and citizenship in Thai forest politics. Society &Natural Resources, 16(1), 19-37.

Wald, Pricsilla (2008). Contagious: cultures, carriers, and the outbreak narrative. Durham, NC: Duke Uiversity Press.

Ybarra, M. (2012). Taming the jungle, saving the Maya Forest: Sedimented counterinsurgency practices in contemporary Guatemalan conservation. Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(2), 479-502.

 

CfP POLLEN20 – ‘Ecosystem Services’, ‘Natural Capital’ and the future of environmental politics

Amber Huff

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN20)
Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

Session organizers

Markus Leibenath (Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development, Dresden, Germany) and Brian Coffey (RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia).

Submissions should include author name(s), affiliation(s), country and email address(es), paper title and an abstract (250 words maximum). They should be sent to m.leibenath@ioer.de by 18th November, 2019.

Session description

Recent years have seen a proliferation of economic concepts and metaphors such as ‘Green Growth’, ‘Ecosystem Services’ (ES) and ‘Natural Capital’ (NC) – not only at global and international levels, but also in many national debates on environmental and conservation policies (Coffey 2015). These terms are often associated with a neoliberal governmentality (Leibenath 2017) and with the proliferation of economic, market-based instruments such as Payments for Ecosystem Services. In any case ES and NC have hitherto been articulated mostly with reformist political projects such as New Green Deal and Green Economy.

However, some voices claim that most debates about ES and NC “remain, by and large, on the margins of policy-making and capital flows” (Dempsey 2016) without much effect on political and economic decision-making. Others assert that one always has to consider the respective political contexts and that it is questionable to make generalising statements about the political effects of ES and NC. Against this background, one aim of this session is to elucidate if and how environmental and conservation policies (including spatial/ landscape planning) have changed at national and sub-national levels under the influence of ES and NC discourses.

Moreover, there are many calls for far-reaching transitions towards greater ecological sustainability (or strong sustainability) which also take into account issues of environmental justice, understood as justice on one planet (Bell 2017). Therefore another guiding question runs if and how concepts such as ES and NC can contribute to these ambitions, for instance by employing them in a more participatory manner or by utilising them for highlighting world-spanning socio-ecological (tele-)connections and injustices.

And finally we are interested in conceptual alternatives to ES and NC. Some authors already have proposed alternatives (or far-reaching expansions) such as the notion of hybrid labour in the sense of co-production by humans and non-humans (Battistoni 2017), the idea of granting rights to nature, or different varieties of an ethic of care and stewardship, rooted in eco-feminist thinking. It would be interesting to introduce and compare several of these perspectives, to assess their potential to influence life-styles, policies and decisions, and finally to report on related experiences from different cultural and political contexts.

We invite conceptual contributions as well as papers with a more empirical orientation from a broad range of perspectives – be it interpretive policy analysis, post-structuralism, governmentality, feminism, ANT or other.

References

Battistoni, A. (2017), Bringing in the work of nature: From natural capital to hybrid labor. Political Theory, 45, 1, 5-31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0090591716638389

Bell, D. (2017), Justice on one planet. In: Gardiner, S. M. & Thompson, A. (Hrsg.), The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics (276-287). Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199941339.013.25

Coffey, B. (2015), Unpacking the politics of natural capital and economic metaphors in environmental policy discourse. Environmental Politics, 203-222. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2015.1090370

Dempsey, J. (2016), Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics. Malden (MA), Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781118640517

Leibenath, M. (2017), Ecosystem services and neoliberal governmentality – German style. Land Use Policy, 64, 307-316. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2017.02.037

 

CfP POLLEN20 – (Re)making rangelands as new investment frontiers: Case studies, critiques and alternative futures

Amber Huff

Session Proposal for Third Biennial Conference of POLLEN
Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

Session organisers

Charis Enns (c.enns@sheffield.ac.uk), Kennedy Mkutu (kmkutu@yahoo.com) and Marie Müller-Koné (marie.mueller@bicc.de)

Session abstract

Nearly half the Earth’s land surface is classified as rangelands, which are areas where vegetation consists predominantly of grasses, grass-like plants and shrubs that can be grazed by livestock and wildlife. Rangelands contribute to the preservation of biodiversity and provide essential environmental services at local and global levels. Rangelands also  support the livelihoods of more than 500 million people around the world – many of whom are pastoralists.

However, globally, those that rely on rangelands are facing multiple, overlapping crises. The degradation of rangelands is a major global concern with some estimates suggesting that nearly 57 percent are now degraded and unable to sustain people and biodiversity. At the same time, rangelands are being rapidly converted for other uses, including industrial agriculture and livestock production, mining and mineral extraction, urban and infrastructure development, biodiversity conservation, afforestation and climate change adaptation. The narratives driving rangeland conversion – as well as the actors incentivising it – are multiple, complex and contradictory. We are interested in understanding how and why rangelands are being (re)made as new frontiers of investment and the implications of this process.

Specifically, we invite papers that explore questions such as:

  • What are the discourses, logics and practices used to legitimise the large-scale enclosure and transformation of rangelands? Who are the actors that are incentivising rangeland conversion? Are these actors the same or different than those driving other types of land conversion/land grab? Is there anything unique about rangelands?
  • How are the languages, logics and practices of policing, militarization, (in)security, surveillance and violence enabling the large-scale enclosure and transformation of rangelands? How do these changes in practices and institutions of organized violence affect dynamics of peace and conflict in the rangelands?
  • Does the (re)making of rangelands as new investment frontiers resolve, displace, reproduce or deepen the environmental, economic and social crises that rangelands face?
  • Is there potential to address the crises that rangelands face without transforming them into new frontiers of investment? (i.e. strengthening communal governance, formalising recognition for Community Conserved Areas, securing land tenure rights etc.)

In addition to being of academic interest, the topic of this panel is timely as global momentum builds for an International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralism and international organisations, such as the United Nations, confirm that there are significant gaps in knowledge and data on rangelands globally.

We are hoping for theoretical and empirical contributions that engage with the questions outlined above in different contexts across the Global South or Global North. We are also open to contributions at various stages of development, including those from early career academics who are still planning their research. Please send a title and abstract (max. 250 words) for your paper or presentation to the session organisers by 20 November 2019. Authors will be notified of their acceptance for the session as soon as possible thereafter.

 

 

CfP POLLEN20 – Calling postgraduate students and early career researchers: please contribute ideas! Extended deadline 22 November

Amber Huff

The Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN20)
Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

In connection with the upcoming Third Biennial conference of the Political Ecology Network in Brighton from 24-26 June 2020, a working group made up of postgraduate researchers at the University of Sussex and Brighton University are organizing a special track for PhD and early career researchers within the conference.

The goal of this track two-fold. First, we aim to  create a space within the conference for and by junior researchers  and activists from a broad range of disciplines and backgrounds who are focused and working on a diverse range of topics on political ecology. Second, we aim to ‘unconference’ POLLEN 20 by introducing a  ‘productively disruptive’ dynamic for the benefit of all attendees and participants.

At this time, our working group invites proposals and ideas from PhD and early career researchers for both formal and not-so-formal conference activities such as field trips, theatre and role plays, masterclasses or dynamic interventions within and around the conference. If you have an idea that you would like to discuss in advance of submission, please do not hesitate to get in touch!

Please submit any ideas by the 22nd November 2019 to: pollen.phd@gmail.com. Please limit proposals to  between 300-500 words, and include a description of activities and how you think these will benefit postgraduate researchers and the broader POLLEN network.