The University of Kentucky Political Ecology Working Group invites you to participate in the Thirteenth Annual Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference (DOPE), to be held from Thursday, February 22nd to Sunday, February 24th, 2024 in Lexington, Kentucky, USA.
Since its origin in 2009, DOPE has been centered around decolonial, feminist, and critical scholarship and activism. DOPE has always engaged scholars and activists from a wide range of backgrounds, whether or not they identify as political ecologists. As we navigate the crises of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, it is essential that we continue to bring together folks working on multiple ecologies: queer, feminist, Indigenous, Black, more-than-human, etc. Therefore, we are calling this year’s conference DOPE+, with the explicit intention of bringing together diverse scholars, activists, and community members to share methods, ideas, art, and activism with one another. This year’s conference will continue DOPE’s long tradition of creating a space for participants to foster praxes of radical care, abundance, reciprocity, and interculturality.
About this year’s theme, Creating From Crisis
For over a decade, DOPE has been cultivated by the energy, support, resources, critiques, contexts, and insurgent ideas brought into this space by participants at home in Kentucky as well as those from all over the world. Yet, the conference has also been altered by countless interwoven layers of global and local crises.
The last few years have challenged the organizing collective itself to find ways to “create from crisis” and build alternative forms of intellectual engagement and creative community collaboration. This has also meant engaging with how these opportunities can perpetuate crises through increased COVID transmission, carbon emissions, and student labor burnout. The newly reconsidered DOPE+ is an acknowledgement of the ever-increasing tensions between harm and recovery, scarcity and abundance, embrace and relinquishment. It foregrounds the desire to curate student-led and community-facing opportunities for knowledge exchange and more-than-human connection, grounded in the possibilities held by political ecology.
We find ourselves in what seems to be an era of crises, where one set of needs are constantly being placed in direct competition with another. These contradictions, and their naming as “crisis” threaten to invoke numbness in the face of a seemingly terminal future, or fear-based, reactionary responses - a salvific model of ecological control that is tied to the same impulses as the actions that led us to collapse in the first place. “The politics of cure, like the ecology of restoration, is a double edged sword” (Ray and Sibaro).
Crisis is not a temporary state that is addressed and resolved upon in its every new arrival. Nor is it some final horizon that we must desperately scramble to avoid. Crises are neither behind us nor ahead of us - rather, they are always already here. To create from crisis requires us to inhabit crisis time and actively acknowledge that things are always already ending and already adapting all around us. To accept precarity as the permanent condition of our time involves an understanding of our individual and collective vulnerability (Tsing). Yet, with crisis also comes rethinking, hope, solidarity, abolition, resistance, mutual aid, creative community practice, and radical care.
How do we understand, live with, experience, exploit, navigate, resist, and research crises and our responses to them? How does political ecology help us “embrace the ethical and practical demands posed by the multiple endings that condition our experience of the everyday” (Ensor) and create from crisis?