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Shailaja Fennell
(University of Cambridge)
Albert Sanghoon Park
(University of Oxford)
Format:
Panel
Streams:
Knowledge production
Sessions:
Wednesday 6 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Leaving, Living and Learning: Knowledge Production and its Impact on Designing Just Sustainable Futures.
Panel P31b at conference DSA2022: Just sustainable futures in an urbanising and mobile world.
This panel examines knowledge production to recover alternative ways of conceptualising sustainable development policies. It invites diverse subjects and approaches, from urbanisation/migration to human/non-human relations, decolonising knowledge, cross-disciplinary/linguistic analyses, and beyond.
Long Abstract:
Sustainable development remains elusive. The mainstream focus on economic growth, on modernity, and the power of science and technology, reduced our human and natural worlds to inputs.
Present conceptions of development and their historiographies remain highly fragmented. Two conspicuous gaps are: (1) a dearth in development interpretations from non-Western languages and transnational spaces, (2) limited analysis of this disjointed knowledge production on sustainable development.
Furthermore, how communities and institutions live, learn, and leave, and are impacted by development policies are erased by these lacunae. Consequently, this panel is open to interdisciplinary and multi-linguistic interventions to recover and re-conceptualise sustainable development ideas and policies.
Sample topics might include:
1. Moving towards non-linear theories and histories of development
2. Recovering lost concepts/conceptions of sustainable development
3. Oppressive relations across human and/or non-human subjects and spaces
We encourage papers that reflect on knowledge production as a means towards imagining just sustainable futures.
The convenors will undertake a collective gaze of the milestones such as the creation of international development institutions in the aftermath of WWI and WWII, and how local and national knowledge production was regarded by these global engagements.
Panelists will upload pre-recorded presentations, and convenors will collate the set of questions from all panelists and discussants. Themes emerging from the questions will be provided by the convenors at the start of the session(s). Each discussant will provide a seven-minute commentary, each panelist has three minutes to respond. The convenors will then moderate and open the floor to questions from the audience.
This paper examines the contributions of women to agricultural production in a dry-zone area of Northern Sri Lanka, and presents data from recent interviews with 50-women farmers. It intends to reconceptualize and 'ungender' institutional forms of knowledge production in agricultural policy design.
Paper long abstract:
The knowledge base for sustainable agricultural policy is fundamentally masculinized. Consequently, policy impacts empower and benefit male farmers while overlooking the significant portion of women engaged in production. This paper examines sustainable farming techniques practiced by women in a dry-zone area of Northern Sri Lanka as an alternative source of knowledge in conceptualizing sustainable climate policies.
Women in Sri Lanka play a substantial role in the agricultural sector: 23% of primary operators in Sri Lanka are women, 19% of agricultural households are headed by women, 42% of economically active women in Sri Lanka are employed in the agriculture sector and women constitute 38% of the paid agriculture workforce (DoCS, 2018, 2019). Despite having a significant role in sustaining the sector, agricultural policies do not contain specific gender considerations supporting women as independent agents in commercial production (Climate Change Secretariat, 2012; MoEF, 2008). Sustainable development for women in agriculture will remain elusive as long as policies framing the sector are dominated by male-centered knowledge and practice.
This paper intends to address gender gaps in how knowledge of sustainable agriculture in dry-zones is conceived by presenting ignored concepts of sustainable development as presented by 50 women commercial level organic and natural farmers in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. The study draws from interviews among communities rebuilding the sector after three decades of conflict displacements that disrupted traditional forms of knowledge inheritance. In doing so, this paper intends to extend fresh data to reconcile current male-dominated policies with the lived experiences of women commercial farmers.
Land and property exist as critical issues across the North-South divide; especially for Black/African/diasporic women. This paper engages Black, property, feminist and abolition studies alongside creative texts; situating the South and Black women at the centre of their own knowledge production.
Paper long abstract:
Land and property exist as critical issues locally and globally; transcending the North-South divide and forcing urgent considerations around urban justice. This is especially true in post/settler-colonial and/or slave-owning societies whose contemporary socio-spatial organization is founded on land theft and/or the propertization of human beings. Today, we are witnessing the contemporary manifestations of these historical drivers of displacement and dispossession. These dynamics are especially acute for Black/African/Afro-descendent women whose lives - historically reduced to property - literally facilitated the establishment and growth of societies around the world. Yet, mainstream global urban discourse and studies are proving ill-equipped to deal with the global, relational and intergenerational entanglements and of race, gender, land and property as foundational to contemporary urban dynamics.
Black peoples exist all over the world. However, Blackness, while often attributed to sites of dispossession, cannot be contained by conventional conceptualizations of subjugation. Black knowledge systems did not begin with encounters with coloniality, imperialism and whiteness; nor are they wholly shaped by them. Blackness, therefore, can be engaged as productively disruptive to the death-dealing logics of the truth-making disciplines and institutions through which it is maintained. Building on the work of post-colonial critics, Southern and African urban scholars, this paper engages the interdisciplinary fields of Black, property/land, feminist/gender and abolition studies alongside Black archives and creative texts; as a restorative, globally-relevant, epistemic practice of using freedom-making theories/methodologies to situate the urban ‘South’ as a site of theorisation and to position Black women at the centre of their own knowledge production.
Some societies seem to live in "frugal abundance", that is, living well with a small consumption and environmental impact. Imagining and designing just sustainable futures could come from co-creation with such societies. I will present how my PhD project is applying this methodology.
Paper long abstract:
Environmental degradation is growing in most parts of the world. Therefore, it is important to consider alternative ways to tackle the environmental crisis. Since GDP and consumption are highly coupled to environmental degradation, models of society which are not based on high levels of these elements are particularly promising.
Empirical evidence suggests that some societies live well while not even consuming and having access to what would be considered as bare necessities by most in the Global North. For instance, the Maasai indigenous people in Kenya have been quantitatively assessed as very satisfied with housing, food, income, material goods, health, social life, their life overall, etc. These societies live in "frugal abundance".
Frugal abundance is a conception of sustainable development that is deeply rooted in indigenous knowledge, practices and institutions, and it could be a new starting point for imagining and designing just sustainable futures.
In my presentation, I would further explain the concept of frugal abundance but particularly focus on my PhD project's methodology. The Maasai in Kenya, an Ecovillage in Scotland and a "slow fishing village" in Iceland will be involved in participatory workshops to imagine pathways for their national society to move towards frugal abundance, applying a method called "backcasting". By subsequently analysing these pathways with policymakers, activists and academics, I hope to give them a firmer real-world grounding. Fieldwork activities will normally start in May and I should be able to provide preliminary results about one case at the conference.
The construction of utopias in different geographical locations in the Global South are built on different understandings of vulnerability. An increasingly stratified form of provision changes information availability and knowledge management and this affects the understanding of sustainability.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the value of designing bottom-up indicators of resource sustainability. The rationale for this approach to managing energy transitions is that a commitment to sustainability require not only specific, monitorable indicators but also an enabling knowledge framework and implementation capacity within communities.
The paper examines energy transitions in countries in the Global South, and its relationship to recent work on energy justice and its relationship to Kantian ethics, which regards each person as an end (Sovacool and Dworkin, 2016). The paper makes the case that it is important to identify realistic utopias (Rawls, 1999) to understand the goals of development as set out by participants in the development process. It argues that the construction of utopias in different geographical locations in the Global South are built on an understanding of vulnerability that is located within socio-cultural-political context of the rural community.
The paper argues that the shift to forms of public private partnerships in the provision of services, with a simultaneous relinquishing of state responsibility can redraw the political space for community measurement of resource sustainability. In contrast, undergirding the provision for all citizens can increase the democratisation of everyday life. From an analysis of cases in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, it shows that an increasingly stratified provision changes the information base shared by all citizens, regarding energy services and its environmental impact. Alternatively, an increase in knowledge circulation within communities and advocacy of their own solutions can increase adoption of their forms of energy use by the Global North.
Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality, and to see the links to virtual rooms. Log in
Albert Sanghoon Park (University of Oxford)
Short Abstract:
This panel examines knowledge production to recover alternative ways of conceptualising sustainable development policies. It invites diverse subjects and approaches, from urbanisation/migration to human/non-human relations, decolonising knowledge, cross-disciplinary/linguistic analyses, and beyond.
Long Abstract:
Sustainable development remains elusive. The mainstream focus on economic growth, on modernity, and the power of science and technology, reduced our human and natural worlds to inputs.
Present conceptions of development and their historiographies remain highly fragmented. Two conspicuous gaps are: (1) a dearth in development interpretations from non-Western languages and transnational spaces, (2) limited analysis of this disjointed knowledge production on sustainable development.
Furthermore, how communities and institutions live, learn, and leave, and are impacted by development policies are erased by these lacunae. Consequently, this panel is open to interdisciplinary and multi-linguistic interventions to recover and re-conceptualise sustainable development ideas and policies.
Sample topics might include:
1. Moving towards non-linear theories and histories of development
2. Recovering lost concepts/conceptions of sustainable development
3. Oppressive relations across human and/or non-human subjects and spaces
We encourage papers that reflect on knowledge production as a means towards imagining just sustainable futures.
The convenors will undertake a collective gaze of the milestones such as the creation of international development institutions in the aftermath of WWI and WWII, and how local and national knowledge production was regarded by these global engagements.
Panelists will upload pre-recorded presentations, and convenors will collate the set of questions from all panelists and discussants. Themes emerging from the questions will be provided by the convenors at the start of the session(s). Each discussant will provide a seven-minute commentary, each panelist has three minutes to respond. The convenors will then moderate and open the floor to questions from the audience.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 6 July, 2022, -Elisapeththu Hoole (University of Cambridge)
Lena Phillips (African Centre for Cities)
Adrien Plomteux (UCL)
Shailaja Fennell (University of Cambridge)