Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis develops a bi-valent theory of uneven development: the material/economic development of Western capitalism based on the slave as commodity and the cultural development of what she calls “New World blacks.” Wynter argues that the “cultural underside” of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, articulated by the metamorphosis of captured Africans into blacks, manifested in practices including: Jonkonnu/Carnival, blues/jazz/reggae, and slave plots on the plantation.
DOPE 2020
Call for Abstracts
Beki McElvain, UC Berkeley & Adriana DiSilvestro, UMBC
In the face of a nearly inconceivable unfolding crisis of ecological destruction, environmental injustices and social inequalities, it has become increasingly important to create spaces recognizing the radical and everyday acts of care that are being contributed in resistance to systems of oppression in all forms.
Over the past 50 years, scholars of various disciplines have pieced together the vibrant field of Appalachian Studies. From its earliest days, scholars of Appalachian Studies have fought for a better future for the region plagued by the crises of mono-industry economies; extreme resource extraction, such as Mountaintop Removal; pollution of air and water; underdevelopment of local governments, infrastructure, and education; prison-building; and general political, economic, and environmental marginalization.
Digitalization encompasses digital data creation (e.g., (geo)datasets, images), digital tool development (e.g., apps, websites), or use of online/offline digital technologies in particular processes (e.g., communication, monitoring). The widespread notion that a digital divide of unequal access to the benefits of digitalization occurs at the global level and within countries motivates efforts to improve both digital infrastructure and literacy, often bolstered by top-down resource transfer.
As political ecology challenges us to consider the power relations at the core of environmental experiences and contexts, how might we extend these discussions beyond the realm of the living? What, in other words, might a political ecology of death and dying look like? While much existing scholarship explores the practices and processes around death through the lens of human experience, in this panel we ask how a political ecology of death pushes us to think of more-than-human experiences and beings.
This call for papers seeks to open up the concept of risk as it operates across different contexts. Risk can be a way of forging connections across temporalities, but it does so in different ways from different vantage points and with different results. Recent scholarship on crisis governance and security regimes reveals an ‘ecological’ inclination in risk calculation, as a set of practices that tracks how things are connected and manages their various projected impacts on one another (Müller-Mahn, 2013; Anderson, 2010).
We seek to generate imaginative speculation on the question of multispecies urban futures. Cities are often seen as an obvious physical manifestation of the ongoing ecological crisis: in order to build them, habitats are destroyed, soil and streams are paved, and species diversity plummets. Yet there are species that thrive in the disturbed edges of human activity. Cities often harbor unintentional landscapes, where we find a diverse range of plant and animal species, including weeds, wildflowers, birds, rodents, insects, and reptiles.
“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.”