CfP POLLEN20 – Land, environment and nature: politics of resources*

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN20)
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

*This session is part of ‘Conversations between political ecology and critical agrarian studies’, a series of six linked sessions that will explore complementarities and tensions between political ecology and critical agrarian studies in relation to land, energy, environment and nature, degrowth, green economies and agrarian struggles and agrarian and environmental movements. 

Session organizer

Charles-Alexis Couvreur (University of Oxford). Please send abstracts of 250 words of less to chalexiscouvreur@gmail.com no later than November22nd.

Session description

Critical agrarian studies has focused on land as the central resource for agrarian production, driving the dynamics of accumulation. However, as with much scholarship originating in Marxist thought, it has been widely critiqued for its failure to engage with environmental questions more broadly. As the ‘environment’ is itself a contested and multi-layered notion, we are interested in further fleshing out how non-human ‘natures’ interact with processes of agrarian change and, more broadly, capital accumulation in rural settings with the following questions:

• How can the role of nature(s) be incorporated into a re-theorisation of agrarian/rural economy dynamics?
• Can diverse knowledge systems recast conventional understandings of the relationships between people, production and nature?
• What are the political and ontological implications of ‘greening’ conventional understandings of agrarian/rural capitalistic transformations?

Contributions from wider rural settings (e.g. fisheries) and disciplinary realms (e.g. geography, anthropology) are particularly encouraged too, for the complementary light they shed on the importance of nature(s) in the multiple processes of capital accumulation that still need to be further unpacked.