We share two new CfPs for the POLLEN24 Conference ( 10-12 June 2024, Lund- Sweden) on "Political Epistemologies and Ontologies" and "Interrogating ontologies and epistemologies of the ‘green transition’: Political…
We share two new CfPs for the POLLEN24 Conference ( 10-12 June 2024, Lund- Sweden) on “Political Epistemologies and Ontologies” and “Interrogating ontologies and epistemologies of the ‘green transition’: Political ecology meets political ontology in the North”. More information below.
Political Epistemologies and Ontologies
Organisers: Fabio Gatti (fabio.gatti@wur.nl), David Ludwig (david.ludwig@wur.nl)- Knowledge, Technology and Innovation group (KTI), Wageningen University
Keywords: Political ecology, Political epistemology, Political ontology, Ontological conflicts
From its inception, political ecology has focused on issues surrounding the (unequal) access to, distribution of, and power relations associated with the management of natural resources. While a considerable body of literature has delved into the idea of “values of nature,” recognizing that diverse valuations of nature are sometimes incompatible, this exploration has predominantly occurred through the lens of political economy.
In recent times, however, a growing body of scholarly interventions has suggested that environmental conflicts extend beyond mere disputes over the material allocation of resources. Relying solely on political economic considerations many times proves inadequate to address conflicts that encompass “things like mountains and forests that emerge as resources through some practices but also as persons through other practices” (de la Cadena and Blaser 2018:5). In essence, material conflicts are frequently entwined with epistemological disputes concerning the production and use of knowledge, as well as ontological clashes regarding heterogeneous ways of representing and relating to the world.
Taking these epistemic and ontological dimensions of environmental conflicts seriously would enrich the analytical depth of political ecology studies, transforming it into a forum where diverse perspectives on understanding the world, creating knowledge, and being into the world converge. As part of the Global Epistemologies and Ontologies (GEOS) research initiative, this panel aims at facilitating this process by building connections between political ecology and the emerging fields of political epistemology and political ontology.
Simultaneously, many post-structuralist and “ontological turn” accounts often neglect the materiality inherent in conflicts over the management of the natural environment. While “forests [might] think” (Kohn, 2013), they remain embedded in a complex web of (inter-)dependencies, constrained within global political economy forces, deeply material power dynamics, and embodied ecologies.
We aim at navigating this intellectual material-ideational battlefield and exploring the more middle-ground positions that rigorously bring together and analyze the economies, ecologies, epistemologies, and ontologies of the different actors involved in socio-environmental contestations.
We welcome contributions from scholars with diverse academic backgrounds, spanning from philosophical to empirical social sciences (philosophy, human geography, cultural anthropology, environmental history), addressing the economic and ecological dimensions of epistemological and ontological conflicts or the epistemic and ontological dimensions of economic and ecological conflicts.
Please submit your 250-300 word proposal, including title, contact information, and three/four keywords to fabio.gatti@wur.nl no later than January 12, 2024. Acceptance notifications will be sent by January 14. Please note that the final submission deadline to the conference organizers is January 15, 2024, so no extension to that date will be possible.
You can also find this CfP here.
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Interrogating ontologies and epistemologies of the ‘green transition’: Political ecology meets political ontology in the North
POLLEN24 – 10-12 June 2024, Lund- Sweden
Organised by: Tatiana Sokolova (Södertörn University), Juliana Porsani (Linköping University)
The hallmark of modern ontology is that it reduces nature and people to resources to be extracted, promoting capital accumulation and colonial exploitation. To critique modernity from the ontological position, political ontology was developed as an analytical framework concerned with the status of the non-modern (Blaser 2009). The history of political ontology as a field of study is intricately connected to political ecology, insofar as both explicate the relationships between nature and society through attention to power (Escobar 2017), seeing territorial struggles as ontological. Burman (2017) suggests that political ontology is concerned with ‘uneven distribution of … ontological weight’ in the same way as political ecology is concerned with the ‘uneven distribution of environmental burdens and privileges’ (p. 935). The materiality of unsustainability is linked to political ontology through commodification of reality, which, in turn, is engendered by coloniality of reality. Epistemology is indispensable in this critique as, according to Escobar (2017), ontological struggles produce knowledges central to the quest for transitions towards a pluriverse of sustainable ways of living. Similarly, Bacchi (2012) sees research as a political practice of shaping different realities – and thus an exercise of power.
Although Blaser’s philosophical project is intimately linked with the critique of coloniality, engaging with green transitions in the Global North through the political ontology framework is a salient theoretical proposition. It helps to reshape the discussions on the green transitions (Ehrnström-Fuentes forthcoming) to include questions ‘beyond technical fixes’ (Nightingale et al. 2020): the meaning of a good life, well-being, and the reconnection between land and those who live on it. Understanding and critiquing political ontology of modernity is as relevant in the societies of the Global North, where modernity was brought forth, as in those to which it was exported, as both are subject to its contradictions.
This session seeks to explore ontologies and epistemologies of ‘green transitions’ in the Global North, as well as their ripple effects in the Global South. The session welcomes contributions dealing with green transition and decoloniality through the lenses of political ecology and/or political ontology.
Please submit proposals no later than 12 January 2023, to allow for final submission to the conference organisers by 15 January. Please send a 250-300 word proposal, with title, contact information, and three keywords as a Word attachment to tatiana.sokolova@sh.se
Bacchi, Carol. 2012. ‘Strategic Interventions and Ontological Politics: Research as Political Practice’. In Engaging with Carol Bacchi, edited by Angelique Bletsas and Chris Beasley, 1st ed., 141–57. University of Adelaide Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/UPO9780987171856.012.
Blaser, Mario. 2009. ‘POLITICAL ONTOLOGY: Cultural Studies without “Cultures”?’ Cultural Studies 23 (5–6): 873–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380903208023.
Burman, Anders. 2017. ‘The Political Ontology of Climate Change: Moral Meteorology, Climate Justice, and the Coloniality of Reality in the Bolivian Andes’. Journal of Political Ecology 24 (1). https://doi.org/10.2458/v24i1.20974.
Ehrnström-Fuentes, Maria. forthcoming. ‘Energy Transitions and the Ontological Politics of the Pluriverse’.
Escobar, Arturo. 2017. ‘Sustaining the Pluriverse: The Political Ontology of Territorial Struggles in Latin America’. In The Anthropology of Sustainability, edited by Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis, 237–56. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56636-2_14.
Nightingale, Andrea Joslyn, Siri Eriksen, Marcus Taylor, Timothy Forsyth, Mark Pelling, Andrew Newsham, Emily Boyd, et al. 2020. ‘Beyond Technical Fixes: Climate Solutions and the Great Derangement’. Climate and Development 12 (4): 343–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/17565529.2019.1624495.