Political Ecology
The Political Ecology Research Strand seeks to bring together academic staff and postgraduate research students from across the University with an interest in the knowledge dynamics and power struggles animating contemporary human–environment relations.
The strand welcomes all those committed to advancing critical scholarship of the processes by which nonhuman natures are conceptualised, mapped, governed and reconstituted. Its current members’ interests span diverse issues including: climate change; biodiversity conservation; energy cultures and transition; environmental risk, hazards and resilience; and resource making and extraction.
The strand aims to facilitate exchange and discussion on these and other related topics through lunchtime seminars organised during term time.
Seminar Programme 2020–21
4th November 2020
Alexander Dunlap, University of Oslo
Entangled in Infrastructure: Infrastructural colonization, positionality & the ecocide-genocide nexus in political ecology
2nd December 2020
Anna Krzywoszynska, University of Sheffield
Towards a Gaian agriculture: the knowledge politics of composing with soil microbes
9th December 2020
Kalpana Wilson, Birkbeck, University of London
Racism, Imperialism and International Development: Re-engaging with Marxism as a methodology of the Global South
24th February 2021
Elsa Devienne, Northumbria University
The Sand Rush: An Environmental History of Los Angeles’s Beaches
10th March 2021
Stefania Barca, Uppsala University
Labour, ecology and social reproduction
24th March 2021
Adriana Suarez-Delucchi, University of Bristol
Introducing Institutional Ethnography to the political ecology of drinking water – The case of Chile
Seminar Programme 2019–20
6th November 2019
Kasia Paprocki, London School of Economics
Threatening Dystopias: Development politics and the anticipation of climate crisis in Bangladesh
20th November 2019
Naomi Millner, University of Bristol
As the drone flies: A vertical politics of contestation in the Maya Forest, Guatemala
20th November 2019
Monica Amador, University of Bristol
Making a regional national park in Colombia: State practices of reforestation in the Serraniá de las Quincha
18th December 2019
Alex Loftus, King’s College London
Political Ecological People
5th February 2020
Ben Neimark, Lancaster University
The Rise of the Eco-Precariat: A New Dangerous Working Class
12th February 2020
Emma Mawdsley, University of Cambridge
The Southernisation of ‘development’
19th February 2020
Penelope Anthias, Durham University
The Pluri-Extractivist State: Regional Autonomy and the Limits of Indigenous Representation in Bolivia’s Gran Chaco Province
Seminar Programme 2018–19
10th October 2018
Maan Barua, University of Cambridge
Animating Capital: Work, Commodities, Circulation
10th October 2018
Bram Buscher, Wageningen University
The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene
23rd October 2018
Sian Sullivan,
Political Ecology, pasts and presents: From science, myth and power to post-truth?
6th November 2018
Rosaleen Duffy, University of Sheffield
Political Ecologies of Security: Thinking through the illegal wildlife trade
20th November 2018
Shela Sheikh, Goldsmiths, University of London
‘That Which We Cannot Not Want’: Environmental Racism, More-than-human Witnessing and the Paradoxes of Representation
4th December 2018
Jonathan Silver, University of Sheffield
Suffocating Cities: Urban Political Ecology and Climate Change as Socio-Ecological Violence
20th February 2019
Michael Bloomfield, University of Bath
Are there hidden costs to corporate shaming campaigns and the ‘private’ governance they give rise to?
20th March 2019
Paul Chatterton, University of Leeds
Unlocking sustainable cities: A manifesto for real change
29th May 2019
Eszter Kovacs, University of Cambridge
The importance of rural resources to an emerging authoritarian Hungarian state
4th June 2019
Sophie Haines, University of Oxford
Watershed logistics: Infrastructural environments and water practices in Belize