In the Global North, natural gas is often touted as a stepping stone to cleaner energy futures. However, climate activists have argued that natural gas is another dirty fossil fuel that degrades land, pollutes water, and creates toxic air pollution. And like the places where other fossil fuels are extracted or processed, marginalized communities take the brunt of the social, economic, and environmental burden created by extractive industries. Despite this burden, resistance to such projects remains strong in many communities.
DOPE 2020
In the wake of a global surge in initiatives reshaping the human-nature relationship, this panel proposal seeks to explore the role of “co-creation” as a valuable principle across various disciplines such as ecological restoration and rewilding, permaculture, agroforestry and environmental activism. While there has been a recent increase in attention towards the idea of “co-existence” between humans and wildlife, the concept of "co-creation" has remained underexposed.
Note: We are open to making this a hybrid session, if interested participants reach out to us inquiring about this.
This session considers current political ecology engagements with the state and how “the state” is now understood as a (settler) colonial manifestation of political, cultural, and social domination. Political ecologists have made strides in grappling with how colonialism and the racialization of nature structure eco-social relationships in ways that reinforce the state itself (Ranganathan 2015; Roane 2022).
Community-engaged research and creative pedagogies flourish in many forms in higher education settings. From structured service-learning programs to community-based research classes and direct scholar-activist work with students, faculty and graduate students--when supported by their institutions, and sometimes when unsupported--work to create pedagogical settings focused on engaging students in struggles for socioecological justice.
This panel aims to bring together research that situates agro-industry and the global food system in a broader analysis of racial capitalism, military industrial complex and the racial state.
Sovereignty and territorialization are vital to extraction, dispossession, and colonization. While political geographers and political ecologists have long explored the connections between these processes, new forms of territoriality and new ways of thinking about sovereignty have inspired and generated new forms of resistance. This session will interrogate the role of power and resistance in and on landscapes of extraction.
Political and social crises surround our moment, distorting our social-relations with each other, with the non-human world, and the future itself. Despite ongoing and compounding crises, on the ground movements and scholar-activists’ work continue to insist on life, creating pathways towards abundant, caring, and liberatory futures. In this session, we call for papers that contend, expand, deepen, and make visible the ways in which local and global Black, Indigenous, and communities of color choose to make life in the here and now (Tuck, 2009).
Human history is deeply interwoven with the life of animals. Despite the long history of dialectical human-animal relations, animals have comparatively received ‘a curious lack of interest in the political’ (Srinivasan, 2016, p.76; Hobson, 2007).
Climate change is already affecting us and its impacts are felt unevenly across lines of geography, race, gender, class, disability and more. However, vibrant resistance along multiple fronts has demanded swift and meaningful action on climate change. This session is seeking papers related to activist movements focused on climate justice. The theme of this session flows from the conference theme “Creating from Crisis” and emphasizes the creative ways that activists have resisted the fossil fuel industry and climate injustice.