DOPE2012 Paper Competition Winners

UKPEWG is pleased to announce the winners of the three paper competitions held at the Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference!

DOPE Graduate Research Paper Award- Ravic Nijbroek, University of South Florida, ""Normative Adaptation to Sea Level Rise: Discourse, Environmental Knowledge and Adaptation Policies in Suriname"

DOPE Graduate Student Paper Competition: Theory in Critical Political Ecology- Lucy McAllister, University of Colorado, Boulder, “Illegal Crossings: United States' Hazardous Waste in India”

Undergraduate Paper Competition- Luis Alberto  Lei, Sarah Lawrence College, "Agricultural Modernization in Norte Grande, Argentina: A case analysis through the Tuhama Diversion Dike"

For information on the paper competitions, see http://www.politicalecology.org/2011/10/announcing-two-graduate-student-paper.html

Congrats to all three competitions winners! Both of the graduate student winners have been invited to submit their work to excellent open-source journals. 

Pre-DOPE2012 Lecture by Daniel Faber

On Thursday, April 12, Dr. Daniel Faber will present a lecture,"The New Political Ecology of American Capitalism: Environmentalism at a Crossroads", at 4PM in room 249 of the Student Center.
In his talk, Dr. Faber will discuss some of the major achievements and challenges confronting the environmental movement. Pressured by increased international competition and the demand for higher profits, American largest and most powerful corporate polluters are leading a political offensive aimed at weakening many of the country's most essential environmental, occupational, and consumer protection laws. In addition, corporate-led globalization is also facilitating the export of ecological hazards abroad. The result is a deepening of the ecological crisis in both the United States and the Global South. However, not all people are impacted equally. In this process of capital restructuring, it is the most marginalized segments of society -poor people of color and the working class-that suffer the greatest environmental abuses. Hence, the environmental movement is at a crossroads. This talk will address new forms of environmental activism that are beginning to take root in American society.

Housing for DOPE2012

We have received some requests for information about housing. Unfortunately, there is not too much we can do at this point about finding places for conference attendees to stay, but here are some suggestions.

DOPE2012 Podcast

Jairus Rossi, UKPEWG president and DOPE2012 planner, recently did an interview with UK's College of Arts and Sciences office of Podcasts and Social Media to discuss the upcoming Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference, and the working group more generally. Find it here!

Prompt: Other inspirations for political ecologists?

While research in political ecology is typically organized around environmental conflicts, policy, and discourses, we draw inspiration from more than just other academics and our own sense of injustice or curiosity. For this prompt, we want to know what other kinds of relationships (human or otherwise), cultural artifacts (film, art, music), or places not only make you excited to be a political ecologist, but perhaps even inform your work. Responses could come in any number of formats- text responses should be limited to around 300 words, but we also encourage visual or even audio responses. To participate please send your response to ukpewg@gmail.com by April 10, 2012.

Responses: New Direction in Feminist Political Ecology?

Apologies for the delay in posting, we've been really busy getting ready for DOPE2012!

Below you will find two essays that raise a number of excellent questions about the integration of feminist theory and practice in political ecology. We hope that readers will use the comment function to continue this dialog, and perhaps think about reasons for the numerical disparity of submissions between this prompt and others we've posted.

European Network for Political Ecology offers 11 funded PhD scholarships

This looks like an excellent opprotunity for working in exciting places on important political-ecological topics!

The European Network for Political Ecology (ENTITLE) offers 11 generously-funded three-year PhD scholarships available to candidates from anywhere in the world.

About ENTITLE

ENTITLE is an EU-funded Initial Training Network under the Marie Curie actions of FP7, coordinated by ICTA at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (icta.uab.es and www.eco2bcn.es) and with the collaboration of 11 research and NGO partners (Grant Agreement: 289374).

ENTITLE will train 17 researchers in the emerging field of Political Ecology, giving them the theoretical, analytical and complementary skills that will make them employable in jobs related to environmental policy analysis and advocacy. Research and training are framed around five key clusters concerned with the analysis of: environmental conflicts; environmental movements; natural disasters; changes in co-production and the commons; and environmental justice and democracy. Research is based on a series of empirically-based investigations of a geographically and thematically diverse set of case-studies. The researchers of the network will collaborate to offer a theoretical and methodological framework for the empirical research and will synthesize the results of the individual cases in a series of publishable outputs. Research will be action and policy-oriented culminating in a series of action and policy briefs targeting civil society organizations and policy-makers. (More after jump)