Call for Papers AAG – New Orleans, 2018
Violent Atmospheres and Weathered Livelihoods in Southeast Asia
Wolfram Dressler, School of Geography, University of Melbourne, Australia
Mary Mostafanezhad, Department of Geography, University of Hawai’i at Mãnoa
Discussant: Jason Moore, Department of Sociology, Binghamton University, New York
Emerging work on the political ecology of environmental crises addresses the social and material production of crisis and its relation to changing modes of production, and new configurations of capital. Scholars’ framings of crises have drawn upon Marxist conceptualizations of crisis theory and the internal contradictions of capital accumulation. The “crisis as contradiction” has provided analytical fodder for social theorists who have used crisis as a way into critically engaging these internal contradictions (Harvey, 2011, 2015; Moore, 2011, 2015). Early on, Sahlins (1972), for instance, referred to disasters as “revelatory crises” involving processes by which the structural contradictions of the mode of production are revealed through interruptions to socio-economic life that cannot be ignored. A crisis of social reproduction can also result in the exposure of the structural contradictions of modes of production (Watts,1987; Watts, 2017). Yet, crises resulting from contradictions in modes of production do not always reveal more than they conceal. Crises have also been shown to further conceal the deteriorating conditions and relations of production by diverting attention to the branches of crisis itself rather than its structural roots (Soloway, 1994). In other cases, critical scholarship has increasingly interrogated how the moments and periods of ecological disaster can drive acute financial crises (Peet, Robbins & Watts, 2010). Capitalist brokers exploit and ‘overcome’ crises through the further extraction of value through spatial fixes by reorganizing, expanding and connecting ideas, capital and labour to create new markets and financing opportunities (Harvey, 2001, 23). Still others have pointed to the relation between environmental crises and the geographical patterns of metabolic rift produced in part through the division of labor between the “town and countryside”. These relations are seen as reflective of the socioecological contradictions internal to the development of capitalism and the development of environmental crisis itself (Moore, 2015). In Southeast Asia, theories of environmental crises are increasingly brought to bear on regional agrarian and livelihood transitions. Discourses of deforestation, for example, are often framed by urban dwellers as environmental crises that are widely blamed on the rural poor (Mostafanezhad et al., 2016; Montefrio and Dressler, 2016).
In this call for papers we aim to address how various forms of atmospheric crisis emerge, manifest and are represented in the context of capital over-accumulation and livelihood transitions in mainland and insular Southeast Asia. We seek papers that critically engage how violent atmospheric processes and events such as climate change, haze and air pollution intersect with and impact upon other socio-political, economic and environmental process in rural and urban spaces. Rightly or wrongly, violent atmospheres are attributed to a range of sources –small-scale farming, fuel wood burning, urbanization, agro-industrial expansion, and large-scale land conversion etc– that are entangled with livelihoods, emerging translocal struggles and conflicts, and dominant discourses of modernization.
The papers in this panel will address the ways in which blame and responsibility for the causes of environmental crises are represented in official and popular discourses, as well as how these discourses, in turn, mediate everyday practices of environmental governmentality that both challenge and enable livelihood practices. Livelihood transitions and related processes are driving changes in urban-rural land relations in Southeast Asia that often reproduce ethnic, class and urban-rural relations. When we dig to the core of debates over atmospheric crises, we often find historically layered and highly politicized livelihood struggles. In this way, livelihoods in crisis are intimately entangled in webs of meaning as well as modes of production. This panel seeks to integrate emerging scholarship on the political ecology of livelihoods with violent environments (Peluso & Watts, 2001), in order to push forward new understandings of how the material and discursive production of environmental crises mediate increasingly interrelated urban-rural livelihoods in Southeast Asia.
Papers may cover a range of themes and issues in Southeast Asia such as:
– the political economy of haze (and other atmospheric pollutants)
– agro-industrialization, livelihoods and micro-climates
– peasant resistance, social movements, and climate change
– indigenous perceptions of, and adaptation to, extreme weather events/ El Niño/ climate change
– livelihood change, migration and extreme weather (rural-urban nexus)
If you are interested in joining our panel, please send your title and abstract to Wolfram Dressler (wolfram.dressler@unimelb.edu.
References:
Harvey, D. (2015). Crisis theory and the falling rate of profit. In Subasat, T. (Eds) The Great Financial Meltdown (pp. 37-54). Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Harvey, D. (2011). The enigma of capital: and the crises of capitalism, London: Profile Books.
Moore, J. W. (2011). “Transcending the metabolic rift: a theory of crises in the capitalist world-ecology.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 38(1): 1-46.
Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso Books.
Montefrio, M. J. F., & Dressler, W. H. (2016). The green economy and constructions of the “idle” and “unproductive” uplands in the Philippines. World Development, 79,114-126.
Mostafanezhad, M., Norum, R., Shelton, and E., Thompson, A. (2016). Political Ecology of Tourism: Community, Power and the Environment. New York: Routledge.
Peet, R., Robbins, P., & Watts, M. (Eds.). (2010). Global Political Ecology. New York: Routledge.
Peluso, N. L., & Watts, M. (Eds.). (2001). Violent environments. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1972. Stone age economics. Chicago: Aldine and Atherton.
Watts, M. (1987). Drought, environment and food security: some reflections on peasants, pastoralists and commoditization in dryland West Africa. Drought and hunger in Africa. 171-211.
Watts, M. J. (2017). “Frontiers: Authority, Precarity, and Insurgency at the Edge of the State.” World Development (in press).