NATURES OUT OF PLACE? II
BEYOND-HUMAN ECOLOGIES
Session organizers: Dr Amber Huff, The Institute of Development Studies UK, and Dr Adrian Nel, University of Kwazulu-Natal
Presentations
For centuries, cities and its built spaces have been constructed and dominated by the imagination of the human society. Non-human beings have mostly been seen as outsiders, as not belonging to the city, and have therefore been excluded from it. However, in the last few decades, the power laden urban space has gotten entangled with ecology, giving rise to a post-humanist ontology that looks at how non-human agencies exert their influence and shape the cityscape.
Situated in the Bolivian highlands, Lake Poopó made international headlines when its vast body of water dried up late 2015. Heavily impacted by centuries of unregulated mining, the lake area is considered a key site for wetland biodiversity, and home to three tiny communities of the Uru-Qotzuñi people -known as “the people of the water”- who have survived centuries of historical inter-ethnic discrimination. With the lake, the Uru-Qotzuñi communities seem to evaporate as well.
Emotions become increasingly important in political ecology research. Debates have touched upon the role of researcher particularly in feminist political ecology. Working on local food initiatives which we call values-based modes of production and consumption in the corporate food regime, we call for an analysis of social-ecological dimension of conflict and cooperation which focus on the role of more-than-rational forms of resistance.
Impromptu talk at the launch of the Future Natures Centre on the power of names and naming/un-naming, drawing on a short story by Ursula Le Guin, and the politics of naming as they relate to the African Wild Dog.
Impromptu talk at the launch of the Future Natures Centre on the way that art and ecology can be mobilised in struggles over extraction in the Appalachian mountains.
In visual art, film and fiction, ‘the Weird’ is often expressed through imaginative ecologies that play on and with scientific taxonomies, states of matter, and distinctions between human and other. This can decentre and unsettle human rational exceptionalism and individualism (Fisher, 2018; Regan, 2020) and open space for both deep critique and an expanded sense of what the cosmos might contain (Haraway 2016: 30; Fischer, 2018: 2; VanderMeer and VanderMeer, 2010: 29).
Q. for Aditi… Congratulations and hoping for a paper from which we get to know more about the people and monkeys. More observation on macaque lives would be interesting. MY query is about the backgrounds of your participants. Were they homogenous in their locality and socio-economics? If not, how do you think the differences impacted the perception of monkeys?