CfP: Dimensions of Political Ecology 2016

Plants and humans have developed intimate relationships throughout human history, and the nature of those relationships has frequently been fraught with conflicting values and meanings. As such, we seek to examine a wide breadth of topics in this session that explore (il)licit natures and agricultures, from sacred plants – like Mama Coca and peyote – to the global War on Drugs, from re-legalized hemp to taboo tobacco, and all the political ecologies therein. We recognize that illicit plants maintain long histories as foodstuffs, medicines, cultural signifiers and commodities, and we couch our session in the lived realities of planting and harvesting illicit crops. We are primarily interested in the perspectives of growers themselves, though we welcome reflections on law officials, police, processors, distributers, consumers, public health, and the military and prison industrial complexes and their roles in (re)producing illicit agricultures and natures. We also welcome analyses that emphasize illicit crops (or the illegality of crops as such) analyzed from the perspective of agrarian viability, agrarian heritage, agrarian crisis, or agrarian change.

We are interested in illicit agricultures and natures in their varied manifestations across time and space, and, as such, we welcome paper ideas that address:

The production of agrarian (il)licitness

The varied trajectories of illegality and legalization in agriculture

Illicit crops as a livelihood strategy

Redefining and challenging ‘illicit’

Racialization and the production of illicit crops

Coloniality of Drug Wars

Policing agriculture

Indigeneity and the cosmological significance of plants deemed illicit

Please send all paper proposals and inquiries to Garrett Graddy-Lovelace (garrettgraddy@gmail.com) and Nicholas L. Padilla (npadilla@uwm.edu).