Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1177/25148486231151806
G. Modaffari
In October 1970, the city of Genoa was devastated by a major flood. A few weeks later, hundreds of wrecked cars removed from the city's streets were sunk off the coast of Varazze, in the first-ever Italian project to create an artificial reef. This initiative, which was inspired by similar experiences tried out in the United States and other countries, had been aimed at increasing the fish population and protecting the seabed but was carried out without any thorough preliminary scientific study, and produced other effects not in the initial intentions of the project. Nonetheless, this story should be read as one point in the broadest trajectory in the evolution of environmental discourse. This contribution, based on hitherto unpublished visual documentation, is therefore an investigation into the very specific meaning of the environment in Italy at the beginning of the 70s. The first part of the article provides a reconstruction of the operational details involved in creating the new underwater seascape of Varazze while in the second part, the earlier examples of similar initiatives are described, as well as the reactions of the scientific community. In conclusion, we reflect on the legacy of the initiative, both at the environmental level and as a basic step in the relationship between visual media and contemporary environmental discourse.
{"title":"A car showroom for the fish: The visual story of the first-ever artificial reef in Italy and the beginning of contemporary environmental discourse (Varazze, December 1970)","authors":"G. Modaffari","doi":"10.1177/25148486231151806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231151806","url":null,"abstract":"In October 1970, the city of Genoa was devastated by a major flood. A few weeks later, hundreds of wrecked cars removed from the city's streets were sunk off the coast of Varazze, in the first-ever Italian project to create an artificial reef. This initiative, which was inspired by similar experiences tried out in the United States and other countries, had been aimed at increasing the fish population and protecting the seabed but was carried out without any thorough preliminary scientific study, and produced other effects not in the initial intentions of the project. Nonetheless, this story should be read as one point in the broadest trajectory in the evolution of environmental discourse. This contribution, based on hitherto unpublished visual documentation, is therefore an investigation into the very specific meaning of the environment in Italy at the beginning of the 70s. The first part of the article provides a reconstruction of the operational details involved in creating the new underwater seascape of Varazze while in the second part, the earlier examples of similar initiatives are described, as well as the reactions of the scientific community. In conclusion, we reflect on the legacy of the initiative, both at the environmental level and as a basic step in the relationship between visual media and contemporary environmental discourse.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"160 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76938218","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 : 2023-01-31DOI: 10.1177/25148486231151805
Marlotte de Jong, B. Butt
Wildlife poaching has been and continues to be of significant concern to environmental sustainability. While descriptions of poaching often include vivid details about the animal victims and the heroics of those fighting to conserve biodiversity, ambiguity still surrounds ‘the poacher.’ Clarifying the identity of a poacher is necessary to expose a societal tendency to enforce stereotypes on others that perpetuate violence and inequality. Without knowing the identity of a poacher, it becomes easy for society to impose unsubstantiated beliefs upon them that legitimize unjust and violent policies. This research examines how (1) the media and (2) conservation actors construct the identity and context of the poacher to understand how and why violent protected area policies like shoot-to-kill have become accepted conservation strategies. Through a systematic analysis of news articles and primary interviews with conservation actors, we demonstrate how poachers are anonymized, dehumanized, and placed in a space of exception to become legitimate and justifiable targets of violence. We conclude by examining a central paradox that emerges from the state's biopolitical use of violent anti-poaching policies: how does a form of authority that is fundamentally justified in its claims to protect life condone the use of deadly force on its own subjects?
{"title":"Conservation violence: Paradoxes of “making live” and “letting die” in anti-poaching practices","authors":"Marlotte de Jong, B. Butt","doi":"10.1177/25148486231151805","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231151805","url":null,"abstract":"Wildlife poaching has been and continues to be of significant concern to environmental sustainability. While descriptions of poaching often include vivid details about the animal victims and the heroics of those fighting to conserve biodiversity, ambiguity still surrounds ‘the poacher.’ Clarifying the identity of a poacher is necessary to expose a societal tendency to enforce stereotypes on others that perpetuate violence and inequality. Without knowing the identity of a poacher, it becomes easy for society to impose unsubstantiated beliefs upon them that legitimize unjust and violent policies. This research examines how (1) the media and (2) conservation actors construct the identity and context of the poacher to understand how and why violent protected area policies like shoot-to-kill have become accepted conservation strategies. Through a systematic analysis of news articles and primary interviews with conservation actors, we demonstrate how poachers are anonymized, dehumanized, and placed in a space of exception to become legitimate and justifiable targets of violence. We conclude by examining a central paradox that emerges from the state's biopolitical use of violent anti-poaching policies: how does a form of authority that is fundamentally justified in its claims to protect life condone the use of deadly force on its own subjects?","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"401 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76463471","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 : 2023-01-05DOI: 10.1177/25148486221148907
L. Palmer, S. Jackson
In this paper, we trace the social and material effects of a carbon verification encounter in Timor-Leste. Foregrounding the relational historicity of these resource materialities, we inquire into the disorientating but potentially generative place-based effects of carbon offsetting. We unpack carbon's elusive and unruly materiality through our participation in a verification event connected to a reforestation and carbon-offsetting program that encourages individuals and organisations from Australia to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing carbon credits from subsistence farmers in Timor-Leste. We interpret this making, or conjuring, of carbon through interactions between technical experts, program managers, staff, and participants over a 4-day audit of the program and, with the benefit of subsequent interviews with farmers, examine how the opacity of the carbon credit's materiality and its measurement leads to community scepticism and demands for greater methodological clarity and oversight. At the same time, we take issue with critics of market-based conservation programs who assert that carbon offsetting leads inevitably to severe adverse impacts for local communities. Activating a generative understanding of the economic logics of ‘commodity indigenisation’ through attention to the ‘cultural biographies’ or life cycle of things, we evidence fluid movements: complex socio-natural relations and moral economies that humanise nature to reveal and potentially reconfigure the otherwise alienating effects of carbon commodities and their socio-natural technical complex.
{"title":"Conjuring carbon: Resource materialities in Timor-Leste","authors":"L. Palmer, S. Jackson","doi":"10.1177/25148486221148907","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221148907","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we trace the social and material effects of a carbon verification encounter in Timor-Leste. Foregrounding the relational historicity of these resource materialities, we inquire into the disorientating but potentially generative place-based effects of carbon offsetting. We unpack carbon's elusive and unruly materiality through our participation in a verification event connected to a reforestation and carbon-offsetting program that encourages individuals and organisations from Australia to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing carbon credits from subsistence farmers in Timor-Leste. We interpret this making, or conjuring, of carbon through interactions between technical experts, program managers, staff, and participants over a 4-day audit of the program and, with the benefit of subsequent interviews with farmers, examine how the opacity of the carbon credit's materiality and its measurement leads to community scepticism and demands for greater methodological clarity and oversight. At the same time, we take issue with critics of market-based conservation programs who assert that carbon offsetting leads inevitably to severe adverse impacts for local communities. Activating a generative understanding of the economic logics of ‘commodity indigenisation’ through attention to the ‘cultural biographies’ or life cycle of things, we evidence fluid movements: complex socio-natural relations and moral economies that humanise nature to reveal and potentially reconfigure the otherwise alienating effects of carbon commodities and their socio-natural technical complex.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76746821","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 : 2023-01-05DOI: 10.1177/25148486221148646
S. Rzedzian
Within current literature on social movements, the existence and interrelations of multiple counter-hegemonies remains heavily undertheorised. Indeed, while the existence of such phenomena is acknowledged, in as much as scholars recognise that hegemony and counter-hegemony exist in plurality and in variegated forms, attention to the interactions between simultaneously existing counter-hegemonies is underexplored. In this article I draw attention to the ways in which multiple counter-hegemonies exist within a single social movement, and how those counter-hegemonies come into conflict with one another. Specifically, I show how one counter-hegemonic struggle comes to reproduce the hegemony against which the other is fighting. I situate this discussion within a case study of the rights of nature movement, operating in variegated forms within Ecuador and the United Nations’ Harmony with Nature Dialogues.
{"title":"Divergent environmentalisms, conflicting counter-hegemonies: Lessons from the rights of nature movement","authors":"S. Rzedzian","doi":"10.1177/25148486221148646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221148646","url":null,"abstract":"Within current literature on social movements, the existence and interrelations of multiple counter-hegemonies remains heavily undertheorised. Indeed, while the existence of such phenomena is acknowledged, in as much as scholars recognise that hegemony and counter-hegemony exist in plurality and in variegated forms, attention to the interactions between simultaneously existing counter-hegemonies is underexplored. In this article I draw attention to the ways in which multiple counter-hegemonies exist within a single social movement, and how those counter-hegemonies come into conflict with one another. Specifically, I show how one counter-hegemonic struggle comes to reproduce the hegemony against which the other is fighting. I situate this discussion within a case study of the rights of nature movement, operating in variegated forms within Ecuador and the United Nations’ Harmony with Nature Dialogues.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"373 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80511124","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 : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1177/25148486221147172
Abdul Aijaz
The progressive materialization of the modern state and capitalist agrarian production in the interfluvial uplands of Punjab was enabled by colonial ideologies of control over nature as progress. The colonial project of the transformation of the people and place in Punjab was built upon the imperial aesthetics of waste that imagined the local landscape as hideous and pastoral communities as “semi-barbarous.” These imaginaries justified the colonial project of technological control over nature through installation of hydraulic infrastructure and the political control of native communities as investments in cultivation and culture. These statist narratives of progress are built upon an elision of the voices of subaltern communities and their interactions with the modern state. Based on my ethnographic and archival works on pastoral Baloch tribes of the Lower Bari Doab region of Punjab, I argue that a different history emerges if traced from the perspective of the communities located on the margins of this hydrosocial assemblage. This is a minor history that does not privilege state as the protagonist of progress rather traces the stories of survival in the face of eco-scarcity. As the current environmental crisis accentuates the inherent instabilities of the hydrosocial assemblage in the canal colonies, it also reveals limitation of the narratives of control over nature as progress. In a world threatened by the anthropogenic climate crisis, the possibilities of a better future might emerge in curating the stories of survival against the histories of control.
{"title":"State, scarcity, and survival: A minor history of people and place in the Lower Bari Doab, Punjab","authors":"Abdul Aijaz","doi":"10.1177/25148486221147172","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221147172","url":null,"abstract":"The progressive materialization of the modern state and capitalist agrarian production in the interfluvial uplands of Punjab was enabled by colonial ideologies of control over nature as progress. The colonial project of the transformation of the people and place in Punjab was built upon the imperial aesthetics of waste that imagined the local landscape as hideous and pastoral communities as “semi-barbarous.” These imaginaries justified the colonial project of technological control over nature through installation of hydraulic infrastructure and the political control of native communities as investments in cultivation and culture. These statist narratives of progress are built upon an elision of the voices of subaltern communities and their interactions with the modern state. Based on my ethnographic and archival works on pastoral Baloch tribes of the Lower Bari Doab region of Punjab, I argue that a different history emerges if traced from the perspective of the communities located on the margins of this hydrosocial assemblage. This is a minor history that does not privilege state as the protagonist of progress rather traces the stories of survival in the face of eco-scarcity. As the current environmental crisis accentuates the inherent instabilities of the hydrosocial assemblage in the canal colonies, it also reveals limitation of the narratives of control over nature as progress. In a world threatened by the anthropogenic climate crisis, the possibilities of a better future might emerge in curating the stories of survival against the histories of control.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79148912","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 : 2022-12-22DOI: 10.1177/25148486221145410
Carrie Mott
This paper explores the process of settler colonialism in Washington State's Yakima Valley in the early twentieth century as an example of a regional power bloc that sought to maximize white access to natural resources while dispossessing Native Americans of their lands and access to water. Through a multiscalar approach, I consider how colonization and white supremacy were normalized through infrastructural projects crucial to agricultural development and economic prosperity in the US West A discussion of a 1906 Native American grave robbery operates as an anchor for a larger analysis of how irrigation infrastructure and other reclamation projects served the colonizing aims of the US federal government. In the US West, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and Bureau of Reclamation (BoR) were both federal agencies that played critical roles in an era where public lands were being converted to private property and allotted Native American reservation land was significantly diminished after being sold to non-Natives. The grave robbery itself and ensuing trial serve as indications of everyday life in the Yakima Valley in 1906, revealing the interconnections between infrastructural advancements, white supremacist settler colonialism, and grave robbery.
{"title":"Theft: Grave robbery, territorial conquest, and irrigation","authors":"Carrie Mott","doi":"10.1177/25148486221145410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221145410","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the process of settler colonialism in Washington State's Yakima Valley in the early twentieth century as an example of a regional power bloc that sought to maximize white access to natural resources while dispossessing Native Americans of their lands and access to water. Through a multiscalar approach, I consider how colonization and white supremacy were normalized through infrastructural projects crucial to agricultural development and economic prosperity in the US West A discussion of a 1906 Native American grave robbery operates as an anchor for a larger analysis of how irrigation infrastructure and other reclamation projects served the colonizing aims of the US federal government. In the US West, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and Bureau of Reclamation (BoR) were both federal agencies that played critical roles in an era where public lands were being converted to private property and allotted Native American reservation land was significantly diminished after being sold to non-Natives. The grave robbery itself and ensuing trial serve as indications of everyday life in the Yakima Valley in 1906, revealing the interconnections between infrastructural advancements, white supremacist settler colonialism, and grave robbery.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76579002","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 : 2022-12-21DOI: 10.1177/25148486221143666
P. Mayaux, M. Dajani, F. Cleaver, Mohamed Naouri, M. Kuper, T. Hartani
This paper is motivated by the pressing need to understand how water use and irrigated agriculture can be transformed in the interests of both social and environmental sustainability. How can such change come about? In particular, given the generally mixed results of simplified, state-initiated projects of social engineering, what is the potential for transformations in societal regimes of governance to be anchored in the everyday practices of farmers? In this paper, we address these enduring questions in novel ways. We argue that the concept of bricolage, commonly applied to analysing community management of resources, can be developed and deployed to explain broad societal processes of change. To illustrate this, we draw on case studies of irrigated agriculture in Saharan areas of Algeria and in the occupied Golan Heights in Syria. Our case analysis offers insights into how processes of institutional, technological and ideational bricolage entwine, how the state becomes implicated in them and how multiple instances of bricolage accumulate over time to produce meaningful systemic change. In concluding, however, we reflect on the greater propensity of contemporary bricolage to rebalance power relations than to open the way to more ecological farming practices.
{"title":"Explaining societal change through bricolage: Transformations in regimes of water governance","authors":"P. Mayaux, M. Dajani, F. Cleaver, Mohamed Naouri, M. Kuper, T. Hartani","doi":"10.1177/25148486221143666","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221143666","url":null,"abstract":"This paper is motivated by the pressing need to understand how water use and irrigated agriculture can be transformed in the interests of both social and environmental sustainability. How can such change come about? In particular, given the generally mixed results of simplified, state-initiated projects of social engineering, what is the potential for transformations in societal regimes of governance to be anchored in the everyday practices of farmers? In this paper, we address these enduring questions in novel ways. We argue that the concept of bricolage, commonly applied to analysing community management of resources, can be developed and deployed to explain broad societal processes of change. To illustrate this, we draw on case studies of irrigated agriculture in Saharan areas of Algeria and in the occupied Golan Heights in Syria. Our case analysis offers insights into how processes of institutional, technological and ideational bricolage entwine, how the state becomes implicated in them and how multiple instances of bricolage accumulate over time to produce meaningful systemic change. In concluding, however, we reflect on the greater propensity of contemporary bricolage to rebalance power relations than to open the way to more ecological farming practices.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80907027","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 : 2022-12-21DOI: 10.1177/25148486221146686
Elizabeth MacAfee
The emerging field of water ethics analyses and explores the moral implications of particular human–water relations and practices. This article focuses on ethical aspects of planning, management and governance of water quality, in what I refer to as water quality ethics. In particular, I draw attention to the potential for incorporating the ethical perspectives of philosophers Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari into water quality planning, management and governance, opening for exchange between these normative fields of policy and practice with speculative philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari’s ethics emphasises the rejection of externally imposed binaries and categories onto a deeply heterogenous and dynamic world. Therefore, I identify three potentially problematic moments in how water quality is defined and responded to according to these criteria. I provide examples of how abstract and universalising principles can obscure the complexity of individual situations and thus hinder the visibility of alternative solutions. In so doing, I note the possibility for the empirically oriented arena of water justice scholarship to be complemented by a philosophical approach that emphasises the situated, fluid and lively materiality of water and water quality.
{"title":"Critically assembling water quality ethics beyond thresholds, hierarchies and best practices","authors":"Elizabeth MacAfee","doi":"10.1177/25148486221146686","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221146686","url":null,"abstract":"The emerging field of water ethics analyses and explores the moral implications of particular human–water relations and practices. This article focuses on ethical aspects of planning, management and governance of water quality, in what I refer to as water quality ethics. In particular, I draw attention to the potential for incorporating the ethical perspectives of philosophers Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari into water quality planning, management and governance, opening for exchange between these normative fields of policy and practice with speculative philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari’s ethics emphasises the rejection of externally imposed binaries and categories onto a deeply heterogenous and dynamic world. Therefore, I identify three potentially problematic moments in how water quality is defined and responded to according to these criteria. I provide examples of how abstract and universalising principles can obscure the complexity of individual situations and thus hinder the visibility of alternative solutions. In so doing, I note the possibility for the empirically oriented arena of water justice scholarship to be complemented by a philosophical approach that emphasises the situated, fluid and lively materiality of water and water quality.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"282 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75783457","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 : 2022-12-19DOI: 10.1177/25148486221135989
Saurabh Arora, A. Menon, M. Vijayabaskar, Divya Sharma, V. Gajendran, Orcid iD
Confronting social exclusion is considered critical for grappling with poverty, livelihoods, inequality and participation in rural India. Studies highlight how exclusion is produced through hierarchical relations of caste, gender, class, religion, disability and ethnicity, while documenting people's agency to confront exclusions. However, the making of such agency through people's relations with ecologies and technologies is currently neglected. To address this neglect, we focus on different sociomaterial ways of relating – care and exclusion – which constitute people's agency. We argue that giving close attention to multiple ways of relating that coexist and interweave with each other, may be crucial for supporting grassroots transformations for justice and sustainability. To illustrate this ways-of-relating approach to agency, we rely on oral history narratives with three elderly people from rural Tamil Nadu, while building on insights from feminist scholars as well as science and technology studies. Central to the people's histories narrated in this article are uncertainties that yield non-linearities and loose ends. They foreground plural and flexible dimensions of each of our core concepts, from care and exclusion to intersections and relational agency. This open-ended plurality of dimensions, we conclude, may be crucial for concepts to find relevance in widely different settings.
{"title":"Everyday politics of care and exclusion: Conceptualising agency in rural south India","authors":"Saurabh Arora, A. Menon, M. Vijayabaskar, Divya Sharma, V. Gajendran, Orcid iD","doi":"10.1177/25148486221135989","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221135989","url":null,"abstract":"Confronting social exclusion is considered critical for grappling with poverty, livelihoods, inequality and participation in rural India. Studies highlight how exclusion is produced through hierarchical relations of caste, gender, class, religion, disability and ethnicity, while documenting people's agency to confront exclusions. However, the making of such agency through people's relations with ecologies and technologies is currently neglected. To address this neglect, we focus on different sociomaterial ways of relating – care and exclusion – which constitute people's agency. We argue that giving close attention to multiple ways of relating that coexist and interweave with each other, may be crucial for supporting grassroots transformations for justice and sustainability. To illustrate this ways-of-relating approach to agency, we rely on oral history narratives with three elderly people from rural Tamil Nadu, while building on insights from feminist scholars as well as science and technology studies. Central to the people's histories narrated in this article are uncertainties that yield non-linearities and loose ends. They foreground plural and flexible dimensions of each of our core concepts, from care and exclusion to intersections and relational agency. This open-ended plurality of dimensions, we conclude, may be crucial for concepts to find relevance in widely different settings.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"37 1","pages":"1590 - 1613"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90625317","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 : 2022-12-15DOI: 10.1177/25148486221145365
Cameron Harrington
This article examines how imaginaries of security in the Anthropocene function at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), otherwise known as the ‘Doomsday Vault’. Recent explorations by scholars of security have suggested that different ways of seeing, understanding, acting in, and imagining the world are necessary to adequately respond to complex crises in the Anthropocene. The dissolution of the nature/culture divide and the existential risk from planetary threats are said to require new and creative formations of security. Buried in the Norwegian high Arctic, the heavily fortified SGSV was built in 2008 as a planetary-scale, ‘deep-time organisation’ that would forever secure a wide variety of plant seeds and their genetic makeup against regional or global upheavals. The article argues that his seed ‘ark’ materialises three Anthropocene security imaginaries: apocalypse, hope and escape. The prevalence and use of these imaginaries reveal the stability of long-held security logics and challenge the widely-held belief in the innately transformative properties of the Anthropocene concept for security. Instead, the SGSV demonstrates the difficulty in overcoming a collective mindfulness that fixes security to eternal forms even in the midst of unprecedented threats, interventions and technology.
{"title":"The eternal return: Imagining security futures at the Doomsday Vault","authors":"Cameron Harrington","doi":"10.1177/25148486221145365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221145365","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines how imaginaries of security in the Anthropocene function at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), otherwise known as the ‘Doomsday Vault’. Recent explorations by scholars of security have suggested that different ways of seeing, understanding, acting in, and imagining the world are necessary to adequately respond to complex crises in the Anthropocene. The dissolution of the nature/culture divide and the existential risk from planetary threats are said to require new and creative formations of security. Buried in the Norwegian high Arctic, the heavily fortified SGSV was built in 2008 as a planetary-scale, ‘deep-time organisation’ that would forever secure a wide variety of plant seeds and their genetic makeup against regional or global upheavals. The article argues that his seed ‘ark’ materialises three Anthropocene security imaginaries: apocalypse, hope and escape. The prevalence and use of these imaginaries reveal the stability of long-held security logics and challenge the widely-held belief in the innately transformative properties of the Anthropocene concept for security. Instead, the SGSV demonstrates the difficulty in overcoming a collective mindfulness that fixes security to eternal forms even in the midst of unprecedented threats, interventions and technology.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89633924","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}
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