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- Convenors:
-
Eyob Balcha Gebremariam
(University of Bristol)
Yirga Woldeyes (Curtin University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Decolonisation
- Location:
- Palmer 1.05
- Sessions:
- Thursday 29 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The Anthropocene is a geohistorical event of European imperialism and racialised capitalism driven by Eurocentric epistemologies. Hence, the "crisis in the Anthropocene" is a crisis of Eurocentrism. How can we learn/re-imagine non-destructive co-existence with nature from non-Eurocentric knowledges?
Long Abstract:
The Anthropocene is a geohistorical event where European imperialism and racialised capitalism play a vital role. Eurocentric epistemological orientations provided the intellectual underpinning to shape human-to-human and human-to-nature relations. Hence, the "crisis in the Anthropocene" is a crisis of Eurocentrism.
Decentring Eurocentric orientations from our understanding of the Anthropocene enables imagining multiple ways of examining the human-to-human and human-to-nature relations across the world. The race-neutral, "scientific" narratives that explain the ongoing "crisis in the Anthropocene" hardly recognise the existence of non-Eurocentric histories, knowledges, and beings. Hence, one way of critically examining and understanding the "crisis" is by recentring the histories, epistemologies, realities and experiences of societies that received the negatives of European imperialism.
Socio-historical processes often presented as civilisation and development have untold darker sides of dehumanisation, destruction and exploitation. Acknowledging the experiences of marginal voices require epistemic repositioning. We propose coloniality as a useful analytical framework for examining the interplay between Eurocentric and non-Eurocentric ways of existence and knowledge frameworks.
We invite papers that foreground non-Eurocentric onto-epistemic orientations, histories and socio-political and economic relations from which we can learn multiple ways of co-existence with nature without being a source of crisis and destruction. Papers may address questions such as: how can we learn and re-imagine non-destructive co-existence with nature from non-Eurocentric knowledges? How have societies resisted and survived colonial systems and institutions that led to the "crisis of the Anthropocene"? We also welcome papers that broadly address decolonial approaches to studying the Anthropocene.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 29 June, 2023, -Siaan Mackie (Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland)
Paper short abstract:
Te Ao Māori is a world conceptualised by Māori within the colonised context of Aotearoa New Zealand. Guided by ancestral knowledge, Māori continue to maintain and practice an onto-epistemology that supports the earth’s life-giving forces enabling survival, a maturity lost from the developed world.
Paper long abstract:
Respecting, nurturing, and protecting the life-giving forces that enable all life to exist in the world are at the centre of Te Ao Māori, a world conceptualised by the Māori of Aotearoa New Zealand. Guided by mātauranga Māori, a body of living knowledge developed by ancestors and built upon by current generations, respectful relationships amongst people and regenerative relationships with our environment are supported (McAllister et al, 2020; Clapcott et al, 2018). Knowledge and relationships increasingly being drawn upon to return Papatuānuku (earth), at risk biodiversity, and people impacted by the destruction of colonisation to a state of well-being. Te Ao Māori is a spiritual consciousness, a praxis, a values-based ontological orientation supported by an epistemology guided by cultural ethics. It embodies a maturity lost from the developed world distracted with obtaining unlimited economic growth and excessive material comforts to demonstrate their success, power, happiness and development progress. This paper shares selected cultural understandings and examples that support an enduring Māori consciousness and praxis of protecting lands, natural resources, people and culture from destructive colonial thinking and practices. Understandings employed in Kaupapa Māori research and development used across disciplines by Māori practitioners in Aotearoa New Zealand (Tuhiwai Smith, 2021). An Indigenist approach finding support amongst Pākehā (non-Māori) allies committed to developing their own onto-epistemological maturity in support of a genuine reconciliation with Māori, and who understand future generations of all peoples and species within the earth’s biosphere will not survive and thrive under current dominating colonial systems, institutions and imaginary.
Althea-Maria Rivas (SOAS University of London)
Paper short abstract:
There is a need to unpick the fraught conversation on development and reparations. In particular, the discussion has failed to center the experiences of Afro-indigenous populations. This paper considers new ways to locate these histories, and contemporary struggles for justice.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on unravelling the historic and contemporary connections among black indigenous communities in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, namely, the Garifuna in Belize, the Arawak in the Caribbean and the Nama people of Namibia. Drawing upon the work of Tuck and Winter the presentation explores the various claims for reparations that have arisen among these peoples. It goes on to draw linkages between their calls for justice, methods of resistance, the engagements with the post-colonial state. Ultimately the paper aims to provide a more complex conceptualisation of the intersections of indigeneity, blackness and settler-colonialism and development and a more nuanced understanding of the weight of erasure for black indigenous populations.
Whitney Stone (Oregon State University)
Paper short abstract:
In this presentation, I would like to share with audiences my own experience of incorporating decolonial lenses into my work with migrant farmworkers and how to incorporate decolonial scholars into the analysis of and representation of our data.
Paper long abstract:
The U.S.’s agricultural workforce is historically rooted in colonization, and its systems of oppression remain. Migrant farmworkers consist of a vast majority of the U.S. agricultural labor workforce who migrate from other countries to work or migrate around the country to find work. Due to the coloniality of labor in U.S. agriculture, decoloniality was selected as the lens to approach this study, so the participants were not forced into epistemological oppression. I used Grosfoguel’s (2016) concept of racialization and Fanon’s (1967) writings on the zone of being and zone of non-being to analyze the participants’ stories. I drew on post-qualitative inquiry to remove a set of prescribed methods for working with participants and telling their stories of how they resisted oppression in their daily lives. This presentation will focus on incorporating decolonial writers and scholars into analysis and alternative data representation to make research inclusive of participants' experiences.
Jane McCarthy (Open University University of Reading)
Paper short abstract:
To raise the need to connect work on bereavement/death/change/loss, with issues of global oppression/exploitation/diversity, and the significance of these (dis)connections for the planetary crisis
Paper long abstract:
The climate and ecological emergency creates existential challenges to all life on earth, raising issues of how humanity can face our own mortality, along with the inevitable losses and changes arising with the CEE. Current models of bereavement and grief, while often claiming universality for the knowledge produced, are founded in affluent white Anglophone understandings of life and death. At the same time, the origins of the planetary emergency are rooted in colonial histories of the exploitation of all life and resources on earth. This situation seriously undermines efforts to deal with the CEE, while also simultaneously creating major issues of social and epistemic injustice. Anthropocene thinking thus demands urgent new perspectives and interconnections between issues of:
• The planetary emergency
• Death, loss and change
• Dominion over, and exploitation of, all life and resources on earth.
These three aspects are intimately interconnected, yet our knowledge of each largely occurs in siloes. While ‘Western’ models of ‘bereavement’ have been exported to the rest of the world (Klass and Chow, 2011), different places have different histories associated with different social theories and ways of responding to death and its continuing aftermath. By focusing only on political and economically powerful regions, death and bereavement studies limit the questions asked and the conclusions drawn. Drawing on insights from Senegal and Sudan in particular, this presentation will explore non-Eurocentric experiences and knowledge of the continuing aftermath of death and the implications for humanity’s capacity to address the existential challenges at stake.