August 2024 Update

Dear POLLEN Members and Friends,  We are pleased to share with you today the latest publications, vacancies, CfP, and much more from our vibrant community. As we just recently shared,…

Dear POLLEN Members and Friends, 

We are pleased to share with you today the latest publications, vacancies, CfP, and much more from our vibrant community.

As we just recently shared, this week we will hand over the POLLEN Secretariat 2024-2026 to our colleagues at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) in Spain. We have enjoyed interacting with this amazing community for the past two years and, although the secretariat is moving to a new home, we will stay in touch with all of you and continue to contribute to POLLEN as an active member of the network!

As always, if your Node is keen to share its work, vacancy opportunities, or others in our upcoming newsletter, please write to us at politicalecologynetwork@gmail.com.

Enjoy the reading !

Fabiola Espinoza, Juan Samper, Kelly Dorkenoo, Lina Lefstad, Mine Islar, Torsten Krause, and Wim Carton 

Lund University Center for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS)  

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Publications 

Journal articles 

  1. Post, E., & Le Billon, P. (2024). The ‘Green War’: Geopolitical Metabolism and Green Extractivisms. Geopolitics, 1–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2024.2385411

  2. Donfrancesco, V. (2024). De- and re-peasantization through wolves: A more-than-human political ecology of agrarian change. Journal of Political Ecology, 31(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.5720

  3. Singh, R., Negi, R., Gonji, A. I., Sharma, N., & Sharma, R. K. (2024). Past shadows and gender roles: Human-elephant relations and conservation in Southern India. Journal of Political Ecology, 31(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2834

  4. De la Hoz, N., Silva-Garzón, D., Hernández Vidal, N., Gutierrez Escobar, L., Hasenfratz, M. & Fladvad, B., (2024) “Unraveling the colonialities of climate change and action”, Journal of Political Ecology 31(1), 624–635. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.6365

Books  

  1. Sullivan, S. 2024 Hunting for conservation. Conservation Biology  38(4): e14258, https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.14258 (Free Access) 

  2. Kuyakanon, R., Diemberger, H., & Sneath, D. (Eds.). (2021). Cosmopolitical Ecologies Across Asia: Places and Practices of Power in Changing Environments. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003036272

Events & Announcements 

  1. EXALT Dialogue – Contesting Green Extractivism and Eco-modernity in Ireland
    More info: This EXALT Dialogue explores the emerging regimes of green extractivism in Ireland through its unequal ecological exchanges, and in particular through the lens of extractivism. Join us to explore what the EU vision of digitalisation and decarbonisation means in practice. This event speaks to developing concrete correspondence between multiple interconnected sites of green extractivism in Ireland, which extends to providing suggestions for how academic research can productively interface with environmental justice struggles. Talking us through these issues will be Patrick Bresnihan (Maynooth University), Patrick Brodie (University College Dublin), V’cenza Cirefice (Galway University) and Louise Fitzgerald (Dublin City University). They will give a short-talk (15min) on how they have tracked and documented various aspects of the so-called green transition in Ireland, which will be followed by time for them to exchange with each other, before opening up the floor for questions and answers from the audience. The event will be facilitated by Alexander Dunlap. Registration here: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/exalt-2023/exalt-dialogues
    Where: Where: Online on Zoom. A Zoom link will be sent closer to the event.
    When: September 12th, 16.00-18.00 (Finnish time), 14.00-16.00 (British Summer Time)

  2. International Conference: Islands And Island Studies 2025
    More info:The interdisciplinary field of Island Studies began in the early 1990s with the establishment of ISISA (the International Small Islands Studies Association). The field was subsequently enhanced through the formation of SICRI (the Small Island Cultures Research Initiative) in 2005, and with the establishment of a number of academic periodicals, including Island Studies Journal (in 2006), Shima (2007), The Journal of Marine and Island Cultures (2012) and the Okinawan Journal of Island Studies (2020). Organisations such as Island Innovation (founded in 2018) have also pursued collaborative research, development and dialogue between and for islanders. The Islands and Island Studies 2025 conference will provide an opportunity for researchers, administrators, policy makers and islanders to explore key questions concerning island societies and jurisdictions in the early 21st Century and to review research in the field to date. Proposals for papers should be 250–300 words long and should be submitted to islandsandis@gmail.com by November 1st 2024 and notifications of acceptance will be issued by December 10th 2024. Any inquiries as to the suitability of proposed topics and/or proposals for panels can be sent to Philip Hayward (on behalf of the conference organising committee) at prhshima@gmail.com by October 1st 2024. More info: https://shimajournal.org/conferences.php
    Where: JICAS, Jersey
    When: June 3rd–7th 2025.

  3. Book Launch: Settler Ecologies
    More info: The Enduring Nature of Settler Colonialism in Kenya Settler Ecologies tells the story of how settler colonialism becomes memorialized and lives on through ecological relations. Drawing on eight years of research in Laikipia, Kenya, Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio use immersive methods to reveal how animals and plants can be enrolled in the reproduction of settler colonialism. The book details how ecological relations have been unmade and remade to enable settler colonialism to endure as a structure in this part of Kenya. It describes five modes of violent ecological transformation used to prolong structures of settler colonialism: eliminating undesired wild species; rewilding landscapes with more desirable species to settler ecologists; selectively repeopling wilderness to create seemingly more inclusive wild spaces and capitalize on biocultural diversity; rescuing injured animals and species at risk of extinction to shore up moral support for settler ecologies; and extending settler ecologies through landscape approaches to conservation that scale wild spaces.
    Where: Zoom. Registration here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0tcuiorzovH9JahdwdoYLpRBtjsLsh_Fod#/registration
    When: Sep 5, 2024 01:00 PM (Stockholm time)

Vacancies 

  1. Assistant Professor – American University
    Brief description: The Department of Peace, Human Rights, and Cultural Relations (PHRCR) in the School of International Service (SIS) at American University (AU) invites applications for a full-time, tenure-track position in Global Migration Politics, Processes, and Policies at the rank of Assistant Professor beginning August 1, 2025. Special consideration will be given to migration scholarship that focuses on asylum, refugee resettlement and/or dispersal, human rights violations, authoritarian surveillance, or persecution based on political affiliation, race, religion, gender, and/or sexuality. We also welcome scholars whose work contributes to how governments, multilateral institutions, and migrant service providers think about and govern migration life cycles (root causes, transit, and post-migration contexts), and/or demonstrate the capacity for cutting-edge scholarship on migration beyond regional flows to account for emerging global trends and crises.Queries about the search may be sent to Professor Anthony Fontes (awfontes@american.edu). Queries about the online application system may be sent to SIS Faculty Affairs Manager Alissa Iwaniuk (aiwaniuk@american.edu).
    More info: https://american.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/AU/job/Main-Campus-Washington-DC/Assistant-Professor_R1478

  2. Full-time Research Associate- University of British Columbia
    Brief description: The Faculty of Land and Food Systems (Applied Biology Program) at the University of British Columbia invites applications for a full-time Research Associate. This is a one-year position with the possibility for renewal for 3 additional years. The start date is open, until a suitable candidate is found (full consideration will be given to applications received by September 15, 2024). The position will report to the PI (Risa Sargent) and the PERCS social science leads (Hannah Wittman and Juliet Lu) and will be based at the UBC Point Grey (Vancouver) campus. The ‘PERCS’ (Perennial and Ecosystem Restoration for Carbon Sequestration) partnership grant links four Canadian universities and seven partner organizations to develop a path towards accelerated adoption of perennial plantings (e.g., hedgerows, windbreaks, riparian restoration) in agricultural landscapes, in support of Canada’s net zero emissions goal. We are a multi-disciplinary team of ecologists, soil scientists, landscape ecologists, environmental economists, and social scientists working with non-profit and governmental partners to advance research to increase the ability of agricultural landscapes in Canada to sequester atmospheric carbon and provide multiple co-benefits. The Research Associate (RA) will support the Social Science pillar of this partnership, focusing on the patterns and drivers of perennial planting adoption in agricultural lands. We seek candidates with interdisciplinary expertise in Sociology, Geography, Environmental Studies, Political Economy or related fields. Knowledge of Canadian agriculture, particularly of the regulatory landscape, would be considered ideal.
    More info:https://ubc.wd10.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/ubcfacultyjobs/details/Research-Associate_JR18270
    Deadline: September 15, 2024

  3. Assistant Professor of Human Geography – Displacement and Migration – University of Washington
    Brief description: The Department of Geography consistently ranks among the top geography departments in the US. Our department includes faculty and graduate students who conduct internationally recognized research and over 400 undergraduate majors. Our research and teaching collaborations have transformative impacts from local to global scales, confronting urgent challenges of our time. The UW offers a rich environment for interdisciplinary research and collaboration, through units such as the Data Science for Social Good Program at the eScience Institute, the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, the Jackson School of International Studies, Population Health Initiative, Center for Health and the Global Environment, Program on Climate Change, Center for an Informed Public, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities. We seek a human geographer who is conceptually and empirically engaged in research on displacement and migration, with a focus on environmental, political, and/or economic drivers such as climate change, geopolitical instability, or economic development. The successful candidate will have methodological skills in GIS, spatial data science or countermapping, and expertise in data justice, digital sovereignty or data feminisms. A PhD in geography or related field, or foreign equivalent, is required by the start of the appointment.
    More info: https://apply.interfolio.com/152204
    Deadline: September 24, 2024

Calls 

  1. Call for contributions to the edited book The Political Ecology of Forests in West Africa to be published by Routledge. 
    More info: The edited book seeks to document the politics, struggles, and conflicts that are (re)defining the political ecologies of forests across the West African region. It will offer a critical account of the ongoing transformation of West African forest socio-ecologies partly as a continuation of the long history of precolonial, colonial and postcolonial struggles over the region’s forests, and partly as a response to powerful new political, economic, cultural and environmental dynamics. These dynamics raise important questions about the workings of power and the imperatives of social justice. Organized around these questions, this collection will be a new authoritative text on the changing political ecologies of forests across the West African region. We invite contributions from early career and established scholars across the social sciences and activists who take a critical approach to analyzing forest socio-ecologies in the West African region. Contributions can focus on any country or part of the loosely defined region of West Africa. We particularly encourage submissions from contributors based in Africa, and we would like to see submissions from Anglophone and Francophone West Africa. All contributions will be peer-reviewed before successful chapters are finally accepted for publication. We seek contributions that grapple with questions of power and/or social justice along the following indicative themes but are not necessarily limited to them: (i) forest governance at, and across, various scales, (ii) subjectivities, identity, resistance and social movements, (iii) forest ontologies and epistemologies from African perspectives, (iv) knowledge, expertise, scientific forestry, Indigenous knowledge, (vi) control, rights, access and livelihoods, (vii) multi-species and more-than-human perspectives on forests, (viii) histories, memory, colonialism, postcolonialism, race and (de)coloniality, (ix) conflict ecologies, law enforcement, and militarization of forests. The book will be edited by Adeniyi Asiyanbi (University of British Columbia Okanagan), Melis Ece (University of Sussex) and James Fairhead (University of Sussex). To indicate interest, please submit i) an extended abstract in the form of a chapter proposal of 500-1,000 words, inclusive of references ii) biography for each author (100-200 words), iii) primary affiliation of each author and contact details. Please send the proposal and or questions and enquiries to Adeniyi Asiyanbi (a.asiyanbi@ubc.ca), Melis Ece (me329@sussex.ac.uk) or James Fairhead (j.r.fairhead@sussex.ac.uk).
    Deadline: 31th August, 2024. Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be informed by mid-September. Full draft chapters of 7,000 words are due by December 2024. Resubmission of finalized chapters after peer review by June, 2025. We expect publication to be by fall of 2025. 

  2. Call for contribution to the book project: The Political Ecology of Technology: Critical Perspectives on Socio-Ecological Transformations in High-Tech Capitalism
    More info: Edited by Miriam Boyer, Johannes Fehrle, Sarah Hackfort, Cornelius Heimstädt, Juliane Schumacher. High technologies are increasingly influential in producing knowledge about, appropriating and valorizing nature and in shaping environmental politics (e.g., Kloppenburg et al., 2022). Applications of high technologies range from precision agriculture, via molecular biotechnologies, digital carbon management tools, to energy infrastructures. It is apparent that these technologies have profound socio-ecological implications which call for more critical research. The volume explores how high technologies reconfigure the relationships among society, nature, and technology amidst accelerating socio-ecological crises and the imperative for socio-ecological transformation.  It brings together perspectives from Political Ecology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) to advance critical analyses of socio-ecological transformations in high-tech capitalism. Political Ecology approaches to ecological crises analyze the political economy, power dynamics and inequalities in society-nature relations (e.g., Bryant et al. 2015; Görg et al. 2017; Robbins 2019; Gottschlich et al. 2022). STS is an interdisciplinary field that examines the complex interactions between society, technology, and nature and how scientific knowledge and technological innovation are shaped (e.g., Jasanoff 2007; Beck et al. 2021; Doganova 2024). The book seeks to bring the strengths of these fields together, since debates have so far developed largely in parallel (Examples of work bringing these fields into dialogue include Birch and Tyfield 2019; Goldstein and Nost 2022; Levidow 2023). We encourage scholars from political ecology, political economy, environmental politics, critical policy studies, science and technology studies, critical technology theory, ecological economics, and other relevant fields to submit abstracts that address these and related issues. Questions to address in the book include: (i) how can we (re)conceptualize the relations between society, nature and technology in high-tech capitalism?, (ii) What are approaches to theorizing the role of high technologies and infrastructures in the economic valorization of nature?, (iii) How do high technologies shape and are shaped by power dynamics, inequalities and conflicts?, (iv)(How) can high technologies be used for socio-ecological transformations?, (v), What is the role of political institutions, financial actors, civil society, social movements etc. in these dynamics?. Abstracts should be no more than 500 words and outline the chapter’s argument and relevance to the theme of the book. Please submit your abstract to sarah.hackfort@hu-berlin.de.
    Deadline: 30th August, 2024. Accepted authors will be notified by September 15, 2024 and asked to submit chapter drafts by December 31, 2024. We plan to organize a (hybrid) author workshop on January 15- 17, 2025, at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. The aim of the workshop is to provide peer feedback on your draft chapters to allow the contributions in the volume to talk to each other more closely in their revisions. Revisions of the chapters should be submitted by March 15, 2025. 

Other news items 

  1. Check out the latest contributions from the institutional landscapes project: (1) “Methods to Research Land Ownership and Advance Land Justice: The Appalachian Land Study”. Reflecting on their work on land ownership in Central Appalachia, Lindsay Shade and Levi van Sant demonstrate the importance of building grassroots knowledge and solidarity through collaborative action research that draws out people’s lived experiences of the land in contexts of deeply entrenched land inequalities and lack of formal land data. Their innovative approach helps improving access to information about land and land records, and uses critical GIS approaches to visualize inequalities in land tenure and public revenues. Read the contribution here. (2) “Digitalization for Financialization – How New Agricultural Tools Are Facilitating Farmland Investment”. Until recently, scholars have solely focused on the assetization of farmland by financial investors, somewhat unnoticing a parallel trend: the rise of investment into ‘digital agriculture’. Emily Duncan shows how finance’s run on AG tech is intimately entangled with financialization not just because it is pushed by financial investors, but also because AG tech is poised to reformat agriculture in such ways that it becomes more amenable to an effective assetization. Read the contribution here.

  2. Sian Sullivan shares with the POLLEN Community two attempts to use creative methods and collaborations to explore political ecology themes:  1) The film “Lands That History Forgot: Three Journeys with Nami-Daman Elders in North-west Namibia” is online here,  2) “A Bee Song” is a collaboration with a commercial recording artist (Banco de Gaia) that recomposes a song that praises bees, accessed through archive research, as documented in this paper:  Sullivan, S. and Ganuses, W.S. 2021 Recomposing the archive? On sound and (hi)story in Damara / ǂNūkhoe pasts, from Basel to west Namibia. Oral History 49(2): 95-108, Special Issue on ‘Power and the archives’, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48670161.  The song is available on various platforms  (Spotify ; Apple ; Amazon ;  other platforms here).  There’s also a video drawing on research film footage here: ; and a research blog documenting the process leading to this recomposition and our hopes for what it may support here.

  3. We welcome four new POLLEN NODES: (i) Adnan Mirhanoğlu, from the Institute of Geography, University of Hamburg (Germany); (ii) Sophie L. Van Neste, from the INRS Centre Urbanisation Culture Société (Montreal, Canada); (iii) Sultana Jovanovska, from Institute for Political Ecology Skopje (Macedonia), and (iv) Chiara Camponeschi, from the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health, York University (Canada). Remember that you can locate the contact details of the new nodes and their members on the POLLEN Blog Website under the “NODES” section.