Engaged scholarship of human-environment relations: Public Political Ecology & Critical Environmental Justice in an era of radical change
Deadline: October 11, 2019
With recent fires in the Amazon, pipeline protests in South Dakota, a resurgence of authoritarian populisms, and climate strikes across the world, the present moment represents a conjuncture full of peril and promise. The moment calls for engaged, critical scholarship based on forging solidarities across and outside of academia to address pressing issues of environmental change and social injustice. We suggest that political ecology and critical environmental justice, are well suited to address such challenges, providing a set of tools to bridge divides between and within different publics and academia.
Building from scholarship in political ecology and critical environmental justice (see, e.g., Peluso 2015; Osborne 2017; Pellow 2018; Pulido and de Lara 2018; Diagle and Ramírez 2019, inter alia), we aim to foster conversations about how engaged research resonates (or does not) with broader emancipatory struggles. This is a call to question how Public Political Ecology and Critical Environmental Justice are used to dismantle environmental racism, discrimination, and structural inequalities. We invite colleagues and friends to contribute works that consider how current debates about decolonization (and its limits), black geographies, Indigenous studies, feminist theory, and post-colonial approaches intersect with publicly-engaged research and action on environmental issues.
This session is the third installation in a series of activities we have co-organized at American Association of Geographers and Dimensions of Political Ecology conferences since 2017. It also builds from work done in the Public Political Ecology Lab since 2011. Emerging from those efforts, we are now coordinating a special issue and invite contributions from critical scholars whose research, teaching, and art move beyond the confines of academia, expressly engaging publics to advance environmental justice and Earth Stewardship.
While the challenges are great, we suggest that a critical approach never loses sight of the politics of the possible, embracing the notion that “the point is to change it.” We seek contributions that grapple with the challenges posed by current environmental crises, the advances being made to thrive in times of radical socio-ecological change, and the ambivalent outcomes that trouble normative notions of “success” or “failure.”
Topics of particular interest are listed below, but we welcome all seriously interested contributions that are theoretically rich and empirically-grounded:
- Climate justice
- Critical physical geography
- Decolonizing methodologies
- Solidarities
- Plantation geographies
- Abolition ecologies
- Indigenous and Afro-descendant movements
- Everyday and extraordinary forms of resistance
- Disrupting settler colonialism–Indigenous resurgence
- Critical and participatory mapping
By 11 October 2019, please upload your abstract of 150-250 words here: https://forms.gle/UFNBHKPsHWMhtQne7. We will notify folks of our decisions by 20 October 2019. Should you have questions, please contact Joel Correia (joel.correia@latam.ufl.edu) or Tracey Osborne (tosborne@email.arizona.edu).
Works Cited
Daigle, M. and Ramírez, M. M. 2019. Decolonial Geographies. In Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50. T. Jazeel, A. Kent, K. McKittrick, N. Theodore, S. Chari, P. Chatterton, V. Gidwani, N. Heynen, W. Larner, J. Peck, J. Pickerill, M. Werner and M. W. Wright Eds. doi:10.1002/9781119558071.ch14
Osborne, T. 2017. Public political ecology: A community of praxis for Earth stewardship. Journal of Political Ecology 24: 843-860.
Pellow, D. 2018. What is critical environmental justice? Cambridge: Polity.
Peluso, N.L. 2018. Entangled territories in small-scale gold mining frontiers: Labor practices, property, and secrets in Indonesian gold country. World Development 101: 400-416.
Pulido, L. and De Lara, J. 2018. Reimagining ‘justice’ in environmental justice: Radical ecologies, decolonial thought and the Black Radical Tradition. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(1-2): 76-98.