Pub Date : 2023-04-06DOI: 10.1177/25148486231165441
Judith Tsouvalis
This article explores the intra-active collective politics of the Loweswater Care Project (LCP), a ‘new collective’ of humans and nonhumans that assembled in the English Lake District in 2007 to grapple with the potentially toxic blue-green algae ( cyanobacteria) that were proliferating in Loweswater lake. The LCP was motivated by questions similar to those asked by the editors of this Special Issue on ‘Water Matters’ in their call for contributions and to which this article responds, namely ‘how can we acknowledge the agency of more-than-humans in our political ecologies?’ and ‘how can this help us compose better, more balanced, human–environment interactions?’ To answer these questions, the paper examines how the LCP put intra-active collective politics into practice, a form of ontological politics informed by the work of Bruno Latour on object-orientated politics and Karen Barad on agential realism. It explains the key role played in ontological politics by what Barad calls agential cuts and what Law refers to as a method assemblage, both of which can be used grasp the intra-acting agencies entangled in matters of concern. Two examples are given to illustrate this: first, the scientific modelling the LCP undertook to understand connections between land use and water quality, and second, the hydro-geomorphology survey it conducted of the catchment to grasp the links between hydrological processes, land forms, and earth materials. While the first example highlights how method assemblages perform agential cuts and craft realities and presences for new collectives to do ontological politics with, the second illustrates how the realities crafted by the hydro-geomorphology survey impacted on the LCP's sense of collective agency. The paper ends by reflecting on the ethical dimensions of intra-active collective politics directed at composing a better common world and on the issue of ‘care’, both of which require further attention.
这篇文章探讨了Loweswater Care Project (LCP)的内部集体政治,LCP是一个由人类和非人类组成的“新集体”,于2007年聚集在英格兰湖区,以应对Loweswater湖中繁殖的潜在有毒蓝绿藻(蓝藻)。LCP的动机与本期特刊《水问题》的编辑们在呼吁捐款时提出的问题类似,本文对此作出回应,即“我们如何承认在我们的政治生态中有超越人类的作用?”以及“这如何帮助我们构建更好、更平衡的人与环境互动?”为了回答这些问题,本文研究了LCP是如何将积极的集体政治付诸实践的,这是一种本体论政治的形式,由布鲁诺·拉图尔关于面向对象的政治和凯伦·巴拉德关于代理现实主义的工作所启发。它解释了在本体论政治中所起的关键作用,巴拉德称之为代理削减和法所称的方法组合,两者都可以用来把握与关注事项纠缠在一起的内部行为代理。本文给出了两个例子来说明这一点:首先,LCP进行了科学建模,以了解土地利用与水质之间的联系;其次,它对流域进行了水文地貌调查,以掌握水文过程、土地形态和土壤物质之间的联系。第一个例子强调了方法组合如何执行代理切割,并为新集体制作现实和存在,以进行本体论政治,第二个例子说明了水文地貌调查制作的现实如何影响LCP的集体代理感。本文最后反思了旨在构建一个更好的共同世界的积极参与的集体政治的伦理维度,以及“关怀”问题,这两个问题都需要进一步关注。
{"title":"Disentangling Waterworlds: The role of ‘agential cuts’ and ‘method assemblages’ in ontological politics – an example from Loweswater, the English Lake District","authors":"Judith Tsouvalis","doi":"10.1177/25148486231165441","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231165441","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the intra-active collective politics of the Loweswater Care Project (LCP), a ‘new collective’ of humans and nonhumans that assembled in the English Lake District in 2007 to grapple with the potentially toxic blue-green algae ( cyanobacteria) that were proliferating in Loweswater lake. The LCP was motivated by questions similar to those asked by the editors of this Special Issue on ‘Water Matters’ in their call for contributions and to which this article responds, namely ‘how can we acknowledge the agency of more-than-humans in our political ecologies?’ and ‘how can this help us compose better, more balanced, human–environment interactions?’ To answer these questions, the paper examines how the LCP put intra-active collective politics into practice, a form of ontological politics informed by the work of Bruno Latour on object-orientated politics and Karen Barad on agential realism. It explains the key role played in ontological politics by what Barad calls agential cuts and what Law refers to as a method assemblage, both of which can be used grasp the intra-acting agencies entangled in matters of concern. Two examples are given to illustrate this: first, the scientific modelling the LCP undertook to understand connections between land use and water quality, and second, the hydro-geomorphology survey it conducted of the catchment to grasp the links between hydrological processes, land forms, and earth materials. While the first example highlights how method assemblages perform agential cuts and craft realities and presences for new collectives to do ontological politics with, the second illustrates how the realities crafted by the hydro-geomorphology survey impacted on the LCP's sense of collective agency. The paper ends by reflecting on the ethical dimensions of intra-active collective politics directed at composing a better common world and on the issue of ‘care’, both of which require further attention.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89332362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-27DOI: 10.1177/25148486231165457
Carly Baker
The marketing of dog food influences pet-owners to nurture the ‘carnivorous’ nature of the dog, keeping animal-based protein central to the industry. Alas, dog food has a significant impact on welfare. Consumers are aware of this impact, shifting the industry towards alternative pet food movements such as Open Farm, the first certified humane food. This article examines the material and discursive practices through which ‘humaneness’ is constituted as a quality within the humane pet food supply chain and how it reinforces embedded animal hierarchies. By reviewing the marketing and history of commercial dog food production, I show how ‘caring’ for the carnivorous dog lays the framework for killing. I use Open Farm's transparency tool to trace the value chain and compare it with the imagery, discursive claims, and material practices found within the Global Animal Partnership standards. I argue that instead of questioning animal-based protein, humane certification creates an alternative in which the pet owner could still ‘care’ for the wildness of their domesticated dog while simultaneously ‘caring’ for farmed animals. Thus, it reinforces the hierarchies of the industry. Additionally, the validity of the humane claims depends on the animals’ charisma and proximity to humans. In other words, marketing in the humane dog food supply chain creates animal–animal positionalities, in which the animals’ care or killability is mediated through the humans’ supply chain and marketing. However, as I show with interview data, the hierarchies are fragile and must be continuously reinforced, as animals can slip into different positions. Their proximity to humans alters their positionality and their killability.
{"title":"Humane dog food? caring and killing in the certified humane dog food value chain","authors":"Carly Baker","doi":"10.1177/25148486231165457","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231165457","url":null,"abstract":"The marketing of dog food influences pet-owners to nurture the ‘carnivorous’ nature of the dog, keeping animal-based protein central to the industry. Alas, dog food has a significant impact on welfare. Consumers are aware of this impact, shifting the industry towards alternative pet food movements such as Open Farm, the first certified humane food. This article examines the material and discursive practices through which ‘humaneness’ is constituted as a quality within the humane pet food supply chain and how it reinforces embedded animal hierarchies. By reviewing the marketing and history of commercial dog food production, I show how ‘caring’ for the carnivorous dog lays the framework for killing. I use Open Farm's transparency tool to trace the value chain and compare it with the imagery, discursive claims, and material practices found within the Global Animal Partnership standards. I argue that instead of questioning animal-based protein, humane certification creates an alternative in which the pet owner could still ‘care’ for the wildness of their domesticated dog while simultaneously ‘caring’ for farmed animals. Thus, it reinforces the hierarchies of the industry. Additionally, the validity of the humane claims depends on the animals’ charisma and proximity to humans. In other words, marketing in the humane dog food supply chain creates animal–animal positionalities, in which the animals’ care or killability is mediated through the humans’ supply chain and marketing. However, as I show with interview data, the hierarchies are fragile and must be continuously reinforced, as animals can slip into different positions. Their proximity to humans alters their positionality and their killability.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"103 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78370915","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-27DOI: 10.1177/25148486231165447
S. Earley
This article describes the people and forests in traditional Secwépemc territory in the Interior Plateau of British Columbia (BC), Canada. It examines the intersection of neoliberal forest policy and profound ecological change in the south-central region of the province, with careful attention paid to the wider contexts of settler colonialism. The article critiques the implementation of forest policy reform (the Forest and Range Practices Act, enacted in 2004) as it coincided with one of the first major climate change events of landscape-altering magnitude in BC – the mountain pine beetle outbreak. Between 1998 and 2014, the outbreak resulted in tree mortality for roughly half of the mature lodgepole pine trees in the province. It left an expanse of ‘deadwood’ on the landscape, leading to heightened social and political conflict over how the beetle-affected areas were managed. Research methods include transcripts from a public hearing in Tk’emlúps/Kamloops, supplemented by eighteen semi-structured interviews. The article argues that the confluence of neoliberal forest policy and climate change has further entrenched the settler colonial and corporate capture of forests.
{"title":"Deadwood: People, place, and neoliberal forest policy in British Columbia, Canada","authors":"S. Earley","doi":"10.1177/25148486231165447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231165447","url":null,"abstract":"This article describes the people and forests in traditional Secwépemc territory in the Interior Plateau of British Columbia (BC), Canada. It examines the intersection of neoliberal forest policy and profound ecological change in the south-central region of the province, with careful attention paid to the wider contexts of settler colonialism. The article critiques the implementation of forest policy reform (the Forest and Range Practices Act, enacted in 2004) as it coincided with one of the first major climate change events of landscape-altering magnitude in BC – the mountain pine beetle outbreak. Between 1998 and 2014, the outbreak resulted in tree mortality for roughly half of the mature lodgepole pine trees in the province. It left an expanse of ‘deadwood’ on the landscape, leading to heightened social and political conflict over how the beetle-affected areas were managed. Research methods include transcripts from a public hearing in Tk’emlúps/Kamloops, supplemented by eighteen semi-structured interviews. The article argues that the confluence of neoliberal forest policy and climate change has further entrenched the settler colonial and corporate capture of forests.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"79 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75085374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-20DOI: 10.1177/25148486231159299
A. Baptiste, Rachael Baptiste-Garrin
Environmentalism has been defined in multiple ways across the literature from a global perspective, both as an ideology and as a movement. However, the definitions of environmentalism have been either vaguely defined or broad with the most common characterization being that of conservation and preservation being at the heart of environmentalism. While there is considerable research on environmentalism in the industrialized world context, there is still limited research in developing regions, with a dearth of research in the Caribbean, hence the rationale for this research. The physical environments of former colonial states have always been subjected to exploitation, yet the way in which this resource has been used by local populations have not been characterized. This paper begins to examine the ways in which local populations of former colonized states view environmentalism. Taking a case study approach, Jamaica is used as the beginning point of reference. Using interviews with self-identified environmental activists, results indicate that there is, what is uniquely referred to in this paper, a decolonial environmental worldview (DEW) that exists among environmental activists. This worldview is grounded in a number of principles that are tied to the way in which the decolonization process continues to proceed in the Caribbean region. The paper postulates that this DEW framework has elasticity and should be applied to other postcolonial societies to determine its salience.
{"title":"Unearthing the decolonial environmental worldview (DEW): The case of Jamaica","authors":"A. Baptiste, Rachael Baptiste-Garrin","doi":"10.1177/25148486231159299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231159299","url":null,"abstract":"Environmentalism has been defined in multiple ways across the literature from a global perspective, both as an ideology and as a movement. However, the definitions of environmentalism have been either vaguely defined or broad with the most common characterization being that of conservation and preservation being at the heart of environmentalism. While there is considerable research on environmentalism in the industrialized world context, there is still limited research in developing regions, with a dearth of research in the Caribbean, hence the rationale for this research. The physical environments of former colonial states have always been subjected to exploitation, yet the way in which this resource has been used by local populations have not been characterized. This paper begins to examine the ways in which local populations of former colonized states view environmentalism. Taking a case study approach, Jamaica is used as the beginning point of reference. Using interviews with self-identified environmental activists, results indicate that there is, what is uniquely referred to in this paper, a decolonial environmental worldview (DEW) that exists among environmental activists. This worldview is grounded in a number of principles that are tied to the way in which the decolonization process continues to proceed in the Caribbean region. The paper postulates that this DEW framework has elasticity and should be applied to other postcolonial societies to determine its salience.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86486966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1177/25148486231151810
Morgan M. Robertson, Rebecca Lave, M. Doyle
This pair of papers examines and describes the state action necessary to make markets function as environmental policy instruments and as strategies of governance. They do this through a detailed look at the mechanics of environmental credit compliance markets in the US states of Oregon, Ohio, and North Carolina in which stream credits are privately created and sold to developers who have impacted protected stream systems. In this paper, we examine the tools, techniques, and people involved in the creation of a value-bearing stream credit out of a physical stream or river site. These observations reveal important principles of how science functions within governance, as well as where gaps and resistances appear that create unforeseen outcomes in market-led policy. We examine the construction and use of instruments that define natural processes as objects with value; these techniques and tools include databases and spreadsheets, algorithms, and field scoring tools that have been scavenged from a wide range of scientific and governance practices and are not themselves inherently capitalist or developed for capitalist purposes. In three different state settings, the move from measure to value is made in different ways that depend on the local institutional and social context. However, they all act to render a network of interacting ecological forces as a field of discrete ecosystem objects amenable to governance with markets.
{"title":"Making a market in environmental credits I: Streams of value","authors":"Morgan M. Robertson, Rebecca Lave, M. Doyle","doi":"10.1177/25148486231151810","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231151810","url":null,"abstract":"This pair of papers examines and describes the state action necessary to make markets function as environmental policy instruments and as strategies of governance. They do this through a detailed look at the mechanics of environmental credit compliance markets in the US states of Oregon, Ohio, and North Carolina in which stream credits are privately created and sold to developers who have impacted protected stream systems. In this paper, we examine the tools, techniques, and people involved in the creation of a value-bearing stream credit out of a physical stream or river site. These observations reveal important principles of how science functions within governance, as well as where gaps and resistances appear that create unforeseen outcomes in market-led policy. We examine the construction and use of instruments that define natural processes as objects with value; these techniques and tools include databases and spreadsheets, algorithms, and field scoring tools that have been scavenged from a wide range of scientific and governance practices and are not themselves inherently capitalist or developed for capitalist purposes. In three different state settings, the move from measure to value is made in different ways that depend on the local institutional and social context. However, they all act to render a network of interacting ecological forces as a field of discrete ecosystem objects amenable to governance with markets.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87096892","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1177/25148486231151807
Morgan M. Robertson, Rebecca Lave, M. Doyle
This pair of papers examines and describes the state action necessary to make markets function as environmental policy instruments and as strategies of governance. We do this through a detailed look at the mechanics of environmental credit compliance markets in the US states of Oregon, Ohio, and North Carolina in which stream credits are privately created and sold to developers who have impacted protected stream systems. In this paper, we observe that the governance of streams as water resources requires the state to create a scalar hierarchy that fixes certain characteristics of streams at certain scales of state action. These fixes attempt to resolve, bracket, or ignore the temporal and spatial variability of streams that can confound governance; however, these variabilities are essential to the scientific study of streams. At each of the four distinct scales, four different operations crucial to market function were observed; at each scale, elements of natural variability were fixed or confined to be expressed only within the given scale. These observations reveal principles of how scale functions within environmental governance, as well as failures where gaps and resistances appear that create unforeseen outcomes in market-led policy. In three different state settings, the establishment of a fixed scale of governance is made in different ways that depend on the local institutional and social context. However, they all act to render an unruly set of temporal and spatial flows as instead occurring within certain fixed scalar boundaries, and thus amenable to governance with markets.
{"title":"Making a market in environmental credits II: Watershed moments","authors":"Morgan M. Robertson, Rebecca Lave, M. Doyle","doi":"10.1177/25148486231151807","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231151807","url":null,"abstract":"This pair of papers examines and describes the state action necessary to make markets function as environmental policy instruments and as strategies of governance. We do this through a detailed look at the mechanics of environmental credit compliance markets in the US states of Oregon, Ohio, and North Carolina in which stream credits are privately created and sold to developers who have impacted protected stream systems. In this paper, we observe that the governance of streams as water resources requires the state to create a scalar hierarchy that fixes certain characteristics of streams at certain scales of state action. These fixes attempt to resolve, bracket, or ignore the temporal and spatial variability of streams that can confound governance; however, these variabilities are essential to the scientific study of streams. At each of the four distinct scales, four different operations crucial to market function were observed; at each scale, elements of natural variability were fixed or confined to be expressed only within the given scale. These observations reveal principles of how scale functions within environmental governance, as well as failures where gaps and resistances appear that create unforeseen outcomes in market-led policy. In three different state settings, the establishment of a fixed scale of governance is made in different ways that depend on the local institutional and social context. However, they all act to render an unruly set of temporal and spatial flows as instead occurring within certain fixed scalar boundaries, and thus amenable to governance with markets.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84230887","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-14DOI: 10.1177/25148486231162087
S. Mahanty, Sopheak Chann, Soksophea Suong
This article aims to extend and deepen our understanding of how emotions figure in experiences of major nature-society disruptions or “rupture.” Cambodia's Lower Sesan 2 hydropower dam is an example of rupture, which refers to dramatic, adverse, and disruptive episodes that ripple across scale. Against a historical backdrop of land enclosures and dispossession, the dam sparked significant community and civil society resistance. This emotionally charged campaign emphasized that the dam and associated resettlement would erase the impacted communities’ deep customary relationships to the area. Although some community members ultimately refused the resettlement package and moved to customary lands near their flooded village, the majority accepted resettlement. We explore the emotional dimensions of these communities’ experiences, finding that rupture is an inherently emotional process, within layered historical processes of change and violence. The intense emotions that such processes evoke can spark action within the “open moment” (Lund, 2016) that episodes of rupture create; yet the outcomes are highly unpredictable within the asymmetrical political and economic settings that underpin nature-society rupture.
{"title":"The emotional life of rupture at Cambodia's Lower Sesan 2 hydropower dam","authors":"S. Mahanty, Sopheak Chann, Soksophea Suong","doi":"10.1177/25148486231162087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231162087","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims to extend and deepen our understanding of how emotions figure in experiences of major nature-society disruptions or “rupture.” Cambodia's Lower Sesan 2 hydropower dam is an example of rupture, which refers to dramatic, adverse, and disruptive episodes that ripple across scale. Against a historical backdrop of land enclosures and dispossession, the dam sparked significant community and civil society resistance. This emotionally charged campaign emphasized that the dam and associated resettlement would erase the impacted communities’ deep customary relationships to the area. Although some community members ultimately refused the resettlement package and moved to customary lands near their flooded village, the majority accepted resettlement. We explore the emotional dimensions of these communities’ experiences, finding that rupture is an inherently emotional process, within layered historical processes of change and violence. The intense emotions that such processes evoke can spark action within the “open moment” (Lund, 2016) that episodes of rupture create; yet the outcomes are highly unpredictable within the asymmetrical political and economic settings that underpin nature-society rupture.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81601866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-12DOI: 10.1177/25148486231159626
Esther Alloun, N. Cook
Critiques of intersectionality as an additive and simplistic model of understanding identity politics has led to calls for renewed concepts that better grasp the complexity and potential of shared struggle. In this article, we contend that the experiences of activists attempting to practice an intersectional human and animal rights politics are a crucial yet overlooked resource in the development of such conceptual imaginaries and ethical practice. Drawing on an historical case study conducted with activists involved in the 1990s anarchist collective ‘One Struggle’ in Israel/Palestine, we argue that an ethic of shared human and animal rights struggle cannot be separated from place-based and embodied politics. We show that activists cultivating intersectional politics in practice must negotiate affective forces of discomfort, alienation and exhaustion that wear down and constrain the potential for intersectional coalitions and joint struggles. These affects are generated through state disincentives, violence the cultural politics of nationalism and incommensurable differences. In this context, intersectional politics are a precarious achievement, dependent on the capacities of activists to continue to compromise and negotiate affectively charged encounters in everyday settings. To better capture the precarious, contingent and provisional nature of animal and human rights activism, we therefore propose the concept of ‘actually existing intersectionality’, illustrating how intersectionality is retheorised via emplaced, embodied activist practices. In so doing we make visible the work through which intersectional politics coheres through negotiation by actors in particular places and times.
{"title":"Actually existing intersectionality: The place-based and embodied politics of animal and human rights activism","authors":"Esther Alloun, N. Cook","doi":"10.1177/25148486231159626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231159626","url":null,"abstract":"Critiques of intersectionality as an additive and simplistic model of understanding identity politics has led to calls for renewed concepts that better grasp the complexity and potential of shared struggle. In this article, we contend that the experiences of activists attempting to practice an intersectional human and animal rights politics are a crucial yet overlooked resource in the development of such conceptual imaginaries and ethical practice. Drawing on an historical case study conducted with activists involved in the 1990s anarchist collective ‘One Struggle’ in Israel/Palestine, we argue that an ethic of shared human and animal rights struggle cannot be separated from place-based and embodied politics. We show that activists cultivating intersectional politics in practice must negotiate affective forces of discomfort, alienation and exhaustion that wear down and constrain the potential for intersectional coalitions and joint struggles. These affects are generated through state disincentives, violence the cultural politics of nationalism and incommensurable differences. In this context, intersectional politics are a precarious achievement, dependent on the capacities of activists to continue to compromise and negotiate affectively charged encounters in everyday settings. To better capture the precarious, contingent and provisional nature of animal and human rights activism, we therefore propose the concept of ‘actually existing intersectionality’, illustrating how intersectionality is retheorised via emplaced, embodied activist practices. In so doing we make visible the work through which intersectional politics coheres through negotiation by actors in particular places and times.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85198208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-07DOI: 10.1177/25148486231160082
A. Appel
This article explores the potential of unruly wild spaces and foraging practices to enable unmediated encounters and unsettling transformations, through the ethnography of neoforaging praxis and its emphasis on seeking direct “connection.” In pursuit of connection with nature through foraging practices, neoforagers regularly encounter both non-human and human others at the unruly edges and seams of cultivated space. Neoforagers associate the unruliness and immediacy of such encounters with “true connection” and pursue practices that are considered both “connective” and “transformative,” capable of subverting hegemonic narratives and consumerist dependencies. Through the case of Israeli neoforagers in the troubled context of Israel/Palestine, I revisit power and categorical relations in the nation-state from neoforagers’ connection-oriented perspective, making salient ongoing processes in which micro-scale encounters are continuously disrupted by the mediating affects of macro-politics, social categories, cultural schemes and such, making salient that in the nation-state unruly situations and unmediated encounters are all too scarce.
{"title":"Unruly spaces, unsettling transformations: Nature connection, neoforaging, and unmediated encounters with others in Israel/Palestine","authors":"A. Appel","doi":"10.1177/25148486231160082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231160082","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the potential of unruly wild spaces and foraging practices to enable unmediated encounters and unsettling transformations, through the ethnography of neoforaging praxis and its emphasis on seeking direct “connection.” In pursuit of connection with nature through foraging practices, neoforagers regularly encounter both non-human and human others at the unruly edges and seams of cultivated space. Neoforagers associate the unruliness and immediacy of such encounters with “true connection” and pursue practices that are considered both “connective” and “transformative,” capable of subverting hegemonic narratives and consumerist dependencies. Through the case of Israeli neoforagers in the troubled context of Israel/Palestine, I revisit power and categorical relations in the nation-state from neoforagers’ connection-oriented perspective, making salient ongoing processes in which micro-scale encounters are continuously disrupted by the mediating affects of macro-politics, social categories, cultural schemes and such, making salient that in the nation-state unruly situations and unmediated encounters are all too scarce.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"102 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73576053","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-05DOI: 10.1177/25148486231160642
Claudia Díaz-Combs
For years, residents in northeastern Ecuador's Amazonian city of Lago Agrio demanded the expansion of water and sanitation services to peri-urban neighborhoods. Community members regularly filed claims, made demands at town hall meetings, spoke directly to policymakers during neighborhood tours, and assembled an extensive quantitative and qualitative database on the everyday challenges of precarious access to water and sanitation. Their demands were clear: municipal and national governments must use state revenue to improve water and sanitation networks. Engaging an ordinary citizenship framework, this article forwards an interpretation of these actions as ordinary environmental citizenship. Residents dictate how they envisage the role of the Ecuadorian state through citizenship practices that respond to their community's environmental conditions. This article posits that the embodiment of socio-environmental citizenship represented in Lago Agrio is reproduced through relationships cultivated in every day, routine, ordinary experiences textured by a shared sense of insecure access to water and sanitation. Lago Agrians contest exclusion and demand the state use broad financial redistribution to improve and expand public water and sanitation infrastructure.
{"title":"“People are no longer quiet”: Ordinary environmental citizenship in Lago Agrio, Ecuador","authors":"Claudia Díaz-Combs","doi":"10.1177/25148486231160642","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231160642","url":null,"abstract":"For years, residents in northeastern Ecuador's Amazonian city of Lago Agrio demanded the expansion of water and sanitation services to peri-urban neighborhoods. Community members regularly filed claims, made demands at town hall meetings, spoke directly to policymakers during neighborhood tours, and assembled an extensive quantitative and qualitative database on the everyday challenges of precarious access to water and sanitation. Their demands were clear: municipal and national governments must use state revenue to improve water and sanitation networks. Engaging an ordinary citizenship framework, this article forwards an interpretation of these actions as ordinary environmental citizenship. Residents dictate how they envisage the role of the Ecuadorian state through citizenship practices that respond to their community's environmental conditions. This article posits that the embodiment of socio-environmental citizenship represented in Lago Agrio is reproduced through relationships cultivated in every day, routine, ordinary experiences textured by a shared sense of insecure access to water and sanitation. Lago Agrians contest exclusion and demand the state use broad financial redistribution to improve and expand public water and sanitation infrastructure.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"145 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78583521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}