scholarly journals Fluid Epistemologies

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenia Mukherjee ◽  
Pritwinath Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Field Research ◽  
River Islands ◽  
Ecological Implications ◽  
Farakka Barrage ◽  
Collective Resilience ◽  
Flowing Waters ◽  
Land Water ◽  
Shed Light

By using the term “fluid”, this article critically interrogates western ontologies of “solid” (land) and “liquid” (flowing waters), which were transplanted in colonial South Asia and transmitted in post-Independence river/water policies and actions with severe socio-ecological implications. Drawing lessons from recent environmental history and political ecology of water (“hydrosocial”) literature that shed light on liminal scapes beyond the mainstream land/water binary in hydrological studies, this study conceptualizes “fluidscapes” by drawing on field research in the river islands (chars) of Lower Bengal. By capturing snippets of livelihoods in the chars of the Malda and Murshidabad districts, West Bengal, situated upstream and downstream of the Farakka Barrage respectively, this article advances why and how it is imperative to rethink sediment beyond its physical-geomorphological existence and to see it as social sites of interactions. It unravels avenues through which chars can be perceived as not only emblems of uncertainty but also as zones of possibility bestowed with rich ecosystem services and the collective resilience of choruas.

Another Geopolitics? International Relations and the Boundaries of World Order

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regan Burles
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
International System ◽  
World Order ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Ecological Change ◽  
Ecological Theories ◽  
Problems And Solutions ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract Geopolitics has become a key site for articulating the limits of existing theories of international relations and exploring possibilities for alternative political formations that respond to the challenges posed by massive ecological change and global patterns of violence and inequality. This essay addresses three recent books on geopolitics in the age of the Anthropocene: Simon Dalby's Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability (2020), Jairus Victor Grove's Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (2019), and Bruno Latour's Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime (2018). The review outlines and compares how these authors pose contemporary geopolitics as a problem and offer political ecology as the ground for an alternative geopolitics. The essay considers these books in the context of critiques of world politics in international relations to shed light on both the contributions and the limits of political ecological theories of global politics. I argue that the books under review encounter problems and solutions posed in Kant's critical and political writings in relation to the concepts of epigenesis and teleology. These provoke questions about the ontological conceptions of order that enable claims to world political authority in the form of a global international system coextensive with the earth's surface.

scholarly journals When hydrosociality encounters sediments: Transformed lives and livelihoods in the lower basin of the Ganges River

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 641-663 ◽  
Author(s):  
Flore Lafaye de Micheaux ◽  
Jenia Mukherjee ◽  
Christian A Kull
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
River Sediments ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Ganges River ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Ganges Basin ◽  
Active Channels ◽  
State Interventions ◽  
Land Water

The hydrosocial cycle is a central analytical framework in political ecological approaches to water. It helps foreground multiple and subtle interactions between water and society, culture and politics. However, to date it has dealt little with matters other than water flows. In river contexts, biotic and abiotic components play critical roles in the way people engage with and make a living out of rivers, beyond water. This article aims to advance the hydrosocial framework with a deeper consideration of the materiality of rivers. To initiate this approach, the focus is here on sediments. Lives and livelihoods connected to river sediments remain both officially and academically under-explored. This certainly applies to the context of the Lower Ganges basin whose active channels transport huge loads of sediments mainly originating from the Himalayan slopes. Building upon an environmental history perspective and drawing on three spatially nested cases in West Bengal, India, the paper analyses instances of water-sediment-society interactions. The general case study presents colonial state interventions in the Lower Ganges basin waterscapes. The second case study zooms the focus on the 2 km long Farakka Barrage. These explorations reveal how an ‘imported’ conceptual land-water divide infused those interventions, leading to unforeseen effects on riverine lives and livelihoods. Focusing on Hamidpur char, situated few kilometres upstream of the barrage, the third case study recounts the contemporary efforts of local communities to obtain revision of administrative decisions unable to deal with ‘muddyscapes’. Finally, the paper engages with recent debates on the concept of hybridity in land-water nexus to reflect on the specific meaning and role of sediments.

scholarly journals Historical tools and current societal challenges: reflections on a collection of environmental migration cases

2020 ◽  
Vol 198 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 151-162
Author(s):  
Roberta Biasillo
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Horizon 2020 ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
Environmental Migration ◽  
Societal Challenges ◽  
History Of ◽  
Migration Flows ◽  
And Migration

Through considering a "Geo Archive" as a tool of history, this paper explores several conundrums concerning environmental migration in social sciences. It demonstrates how historical perspectives can problematize and unsettle various automatisms that are widely present in journalistic, public, and policy discourses. Through examples from the Geo Archive, the article illustrates how unavoidable historical dimensions can enrich our understandings on the interaction between environmental issues and migration flows. This paper engages with an open access "archive in-the-making". This Geo Archive includes case studies of migration flows and puts those flows in conversation with environmental transformations and climatic changes. The analysed collection presents high-profile stories which are representative samples of different approaches, temporalities, geographies, sources of information, narratives, and scales. This endeavour encompasses different disciplines and fields of expertise: environmental humanities, IT and communication experts, and political ecology. The archive places itself within the realms of public history, environmental history, and history of the present and aims to reach out to wider audiences. This digital humanities project stemmed from a support action funded by the EU initiative Horizon 2020 titled CLISEL whose overarching goal was to analyse and better inform institutional responses and policies addressing climate refugees and migrants.

scholarly journals Artificial lawn people

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 548-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Brooks ◽  
Robert A Francis
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Online Discussion ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Environmental Values ◽  
Cultural Expectations ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Artificial Grass ◽  
Political Ecologies ◽  
Dynamic Relationships ◽  
Shed Light

This paper explores a new artificial political ecology through a novel digital methodology. The emotional impacts of the replacement of living turfgrass landscapes with synthetic simulacra are researched via a netnography of animated and polarised online discussion. We investigate how the cultural use of domestic lawns has extended into the creation of non-living artificial lawns and how the environmental values of these new landscapes are debated. Synthetic polymer (plastic) grasses are increasingly being used as alternatives to turfgrass in domestic gardens, changing urban ecologies. We examine the emotional landscapes that are reproduced in online discourse. Paul Robbins showed that a certain suite of behaviours constitutes ‘Lawn People’. Here we demonstrate that ‘Artificial Lawn People’ act in reference to cultural expectations of a ‘good’ lawn to produce non-living, homogeneous, green and tidy gardens, yet their actions spark fierce criticism from others who do not value this new synthetic nature. Our research involved analysis of 948 online discussion posts, and introduces a secondary notion of ‘artificial people’ as our subjects were anonymous contributors to virtual public debates on the environment: generating impassioned polyvocal contestation. Mumsnet.com is a space of heated discussion between proponents and opponents of artificial lawns. We identify three topics: (i) emotional responses: artificial grass is polarising, and its social value contested; (ii) bio-physical affects: plastic fibres impact human and non-human life and (iii) environmental values: turfgrass replacement influences local and global political ecologies. The conclusions shed light on the dynamic relationships between the emotional values of living and non-living landscapes.

Missing Links? Business History and Environmental Change

2009 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hartmut Berghoff ◽  
Mathias Mutz
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Business History ◽  
Ecological Implications

AbstractBusiness and the natural environment, economy and ecology, are commonly perceived as being irreconcilable opposites. This article evaluates the variables of this opposition and asks for differentiated concepts from business and environmental history. In doing so it analyzes the existing literature in both subdisciplines and looks at why they have been relatively isolated from each other. The authors advocate approaches that integrate business and environmental history and take ecological implications of business as serious as the commercial implications of dealing with nature.

scholarly journals Cultural Diversity, Ecodiversity, and Music Education

2021 ◽  
pp. 163-174
Author(s):  
Vincent C. Bates ◽  
Daniel J. Shevock ◽  
Anita Prest
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Western Apache ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
Ecologically Sustainable ◽  
Communal Responsibility ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractDiversity discourses in music education tend toward anthropocentrism, focusing on human cultures, identities, and institutions. In this chapter, we broaden conceptualizations of diversity in music education to include relationships between music, education, and ecology: understood as interactions among organisms and the physical environment. Diversity in music education can be realized by attending to the ongoing interrelationships of local geography, ecology, and culture, all of which contribute dynamically to local music practices. We situate our analysis within specific Indigenous North American cultures (e.g., Western Apache, Nuu-chah-nulth, Stó:lō, and Syilx) and associated perspectives and philosophies to shed light on the multiple forms of reciprocity that undergird diversity. Indigenous knowledge, in combination with new materialism and political ecology discourses, can help us come back down to earth in ways of being and becoming that are ecologically sustainable, preserving the ecodiversity that exists and grows in place, forging egalitarian relationships and a sense of communal responsibility, fostering reverence for ancestors along with nonhuman lives and topographies, and cultivating musical practices that are one with our respective ecosystems.

scholarly journals Beasts in the Garden: Human-Wildlife Coexistence in India's Past and Present

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meera Anna Oommen
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Natural Habitats ◽  
Protracted Conflict ◽  
Shared Spaces ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Key Species ◽  
Traditional Societies ◽  
Global Arena

Human-wildlife encounters are characterized by a diverse array of engagements located on the continuum between the negative and the positive. In India, protracted conflict with wildlife is reflected in violence across a range of rural and urban ecologies, but is only one aspect of the multiple facets of ongoing human-non-human encounter. Within these shared spaces, there are often equally significant elements of acceptance, tolerance and reverence. Together, these are dependent on context, and can be explored via lived experiences and worldviews, and a moral economy of human-wildlife and human-human relationships. Historically, though hardly static, such relationships have been mediated by the ontological positioning of traditional societies and their embedded rules and practises. In recent years, these tenuous equilibria have been disrupted by top-down catalysts, including universalist conservation agendas percolating from the state and the global arena. This study aims to explore the changing nature of coexistence by using several historical and contemporary vignettes in relation to key species that routinely “transgress” from their primary natural habitats into the “garden” spaces of human cultivation and habitation. The study will argue that insights at the intersection of environmental history, political ecology and anthropology can improve our understanding of human-wildlife coexistence in India as well as across the world.

scholarly journals On Augmented Reality for the Learning of 3D-Geometric Contents: A Preliminary Exploratory Study with 6-Grade Primary Students

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Míriam Flores-Bascuñana ◽  
Pascual D. Diago ◽  
Rafael Villena-Taranilla ◽  
Dionisio F. Yáñez
Keyword(s):  
Augmented Reality ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Primary Students ◽  
Exploratory Approach ◽  
3D Geometry ◽  
Based Instruction ◽  
Technology In Classroom ◽  
Shed Light

Nowadays, Augmented Reality (AR) is one of the emerging technologies with a greater impact in the Education field. Research has proved that AR-based activities improve the teaching and learning processes. Also, the use of this type of technology in classroom facilitates the understanding of contents from different areas as Arts, Mathematics or Science. In this work we propose an AR-based instruction in order to explore the benefits in a 6th-grade Primary course related to 3D-geometry shapes. This first experiment, designed from an exploratory approach, will shed light on new study variables to perform new implementations whose conclusions become more consistent. The results obtained allow us to envisage that AR-based proposals slightly improve the classical didactic methods.

Flame and Fortune in the American West

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory L. Simon
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
American West ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Tax Revenue ◽  
California History ◽  
Policy Responses ◽  
Tunnel Fire ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Social Environmental

This book investigates the ongoing politics, folly, and avarice shaping the production of increasingly widespread yet dangerous suburban and exurban landscapes. The 1991 Oakland Hills Tunnel Fire is used as a starting point to better understand these complex social-environmental processes. The Tunnel Fire is the most destructive fire—in terms of structures lost—in California history. More than 3,000 residential structures burned and 25 lives were lost. Although this fire occurred in Oakland and Berkeley, others like it sear through landscapes in California and the American West that have experienced urban growth and development within areas historically prone to fire. The book blends environmental history, political ecology, and science studies to closely examine the Tunnel Fire within a broader historical and spatial context of regional economic development and natural-resource management, such as the widespread planting of eucalyptus trees as an exotic lure for homeowners and the creation of hillside neighborhoods for tax revenue—decisions that produced communities with increased vulnerability to fire. The book demonstrates how in Oakland a drive for affluence led to a state of vulnerability for rich and poor alike that has only been exacerbated by the rebuilding of neighborhoods after the fire. Despite these troubling trends, the text illustrates how many popular and scientific debates on fire limit the scope and efficacy of policy responses. These risky yet profitable developments (what the book refers to as the Incendiary), as well as proposed strategies for challenging them, are discussed in the context of urbanizing areas around the American West and hold global applicability within hazard-prone areas.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document