Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

Based on co-ecologies, the paper presents collective narratives about co-dependency on the mangroves of children from a fishermen community in Karachi, Pakistan. The research used public art for narrative building which was curated using participatory approach and converted into a resource book.

Paper long abstract:

Working around the idea of co-ecologies, a research and engagement exercise was recently undertaken by myself with indigenous fishermen children on the peninsula off the coast of Karachi. The project aimed to create collective narratives about co-dependency on the mangroves that surround the peninsula, and use the power of art to inspire young minds to appreciate and protect their unique coastal associations. The project questioned conventional research methods using public art and narrative building exercises which were curated using participatory methods and were based on collective decisions and ritualistic actions. The focus of public art activity was on co-designing and ‘can do spirit’ and told a story about nature, humans and home. The emphasis was also on creating new spatial narratives that accommodated interrelations between humans and non-humans, using methods which were novel, bottom up and connected to the locale rather than being pre-determined. Furthermore, historical narratives, personal reflections and discussion-based methods were used to structure student participation to create a sense of awareness and think about the role of humans as part of the larger ecology.

The results were converted into a resource book for primary school teachers. This publication brings together the learnings from the engagement and is meant to serve as a platform for building ideas around art and engagement-based pedagogies. This can help adults inculcate a sense of responsiveness in children towards nature and thus rethink the idea of development.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

To discuss various vulnerabilities faced by women living in Forest-Dependent communities in Africa and intersections between gender and vulnerability in FDCs.

Paper long abstract:

Most communities in rural and peri-urban Africa tend to be Forest-Dependent Communities (FDCs).

They also tend to be highly vulnerable to land and forest-use rights. These vulnerabilities tend to affect women more than men in such communities. They also typically face a dilemma as these communities must simultaneously use and conserve forest ecosystem services. This dilemma makes such communities vulnerable to food security and environmental degradation issues, that present significant challenges to African countries in meeting Sustainable Development Goals 1, 2,11, and 15. This study synthesises evidence on the intersections between gender vulnerabilities and resilience building in FDCs.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This study argues for the rational climatization of human vulnerability, particularly emerging from colonial Plantationocene, exploiting the labour force with employment crisis and hunger-driven difficulties in the sub-Himalayan frontier geography of India.

Paper long abstract:

There is a growing debate on the scholarship of superfluous climate rationalization of social issues and the notion of climate change vulnerability. Decolonising the reductionist ways of interpreting climate change vulnerability, this study argues for the climatization of human vulnerability, particularly emerging from the angle of colonial Plantationocene, the establishment of tea garden colonies and forest villages, exploiting the labour force with employment crisis, and hunger-driven difficulties in the sub-Himalayan frontier geography of India. Specifically, it addresses how planned hunger erodes human resilience to climate change and leads towards vulnerability. The survey villages have roots in colonial tea and commercial timber plantations; for example, the forest and tea plantation villages were established in different parts of the sub-Himalayan Bengal by forcefully bringing labourers. The colonial rulers displaced these families from dry and semi-arid climatic sub-divisions to sub-Himalayan Bengal, a highly humid and flood-prone area. The displaced families have been struggling to adapt to new geographies. Further, the empirics show that the people’s right to work and the fundamental access to food from the tea plantation owner have been eroding through a systemic mechanism. The denial of the responsibilities by the plantation owners and the state to provide food security leads to the production of planned hunger. Therefore, the inadequacy of food in the dysfunctional tea estates and forest villages signifies the state of vulnerability, which has been aggravated by climate change. Furthermore, the intensity of climate-induced vulnerability remarkably depends on the household's position in hunger intensity along with a primary source of income and housing conditions. The environmental calamities and the growing scarcity of natural resources in forest villages in sub-Himalayan West Bengal resharing the struggle for rural livelihoods. Based on the empirical findings and historical evidence, the study argued that today's climate vulnerability is not a stand-alone problem; it is linked to the colonial past and understanding that ‘past of present vulnerability’ along with today's prevailing inequalities would help us to climatize the human vulnerability. Further, we argue and broaden the idea of climate rationalization of relevant social problems from historical, institutional economics, and geographic perspectives rather than a reductionist explanation.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

The paper draws on Latour and Spinoza to read human-nature interactions that occurred during the pandemic which, contesting neoliberalism, were characterized by a more respectful view of nature; building on this analysis, use of similar interactions is called for to further challenge neoliberalism.

Paper long abstract:

During the critical period of the COVID pandemic between 2020-2022, the U.K. Government instituted extensive lockdown as well as other emergency biopolitical measures in an effort to preserve the currently predominant neoliberal regime. One of the effects of these measures was a profound reconfiguration of public space, which became a patchwork of ‘safe’ and ‘dangerous’ areas.

According to this new cartography, nature in its various manifestations, either it be public parks or the chirping of birds, was usually identified as a safe haven for the pursuit of human well-being.

The paper sets itself two goals. Firstly, building on insights developed by various authors including Bruno Latour and Baruch Spinoza, it argues that during the pandemic nature acted as an agent of potential subversive change: some human-nature interactions in fact appeared to modify the abilities of the entities involved in such a way as to catalyse a synergy of emotions, knowledges and practices that made it possible for human beings to contest the predominant mainstream neoliberal values and to experience instead lifeways characterized by a more respectful view of nature.

Secondly, drawing on this analysis, the paper calls for the further investigation, enrichment and consequent extensive, but ‘situated’, deployment in the community of similar human-nature interactions as a way to further stimulate the spread of a more respectful and caring view of nature, in so doing favouring the emergence of other-than-neoliberal worldings.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

Thousands of images of the word ‘also’ photographically mined from gravestones in a Victorian London cemetery wildlife park present a decentred monument of pluriversal relations, democratising human and non-human worlds, and revealing the systemic contradictions in the process.

Paper long abstract:

'Not I, but also' (2024-) presents a series of photographic images isolating all instances of the word 'also' appearing on gravestones in Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, one of the 'magnificent seven' Victorian London cemeteries, now managed as a wildlife park for the wide-ranging community. Through the thousands of largely macro, constrainedly repetitive images, I am affording new hierarchies of attention and relations, decentred from the named human subjects of the graves, towards the plants, moulds, and microorganisms colonising the range of stones, geopolitically mined from around the world, bearing myriad fonts and lettering in various states of disintegration according to their geological composition at the time of extraction, now captured chiefly by smart phone in all weathers, times, lights, and moods.

Privileging this minor conjunctive adverb, the project presents a vast contemporary vanitas – a reminder of our equality in death – and, questionably, a grammatical and visual allegory of democratic relations or justice within the social and natural order – a ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière, 2004).

While aiming to reconfigure the monumental towards a landscape of pluriversal relations, opening dialogues with botanists, geologists, historians, film makers, graphic designers, stone carvers, musicians, necromancers, et al, my authored project nevertheless also performs the now-dominant economy of picture mining, feeding voracious networked algorithmic ecology-destroying heaps of affective geotagged data, reproducing sameness and minutiae difference for our relentless restless attention … also, also, also.

Not I, but also explores non-didactic engagement with narratives of climate change and justice and its inherent contradictions.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

This paper provides an account of a methodological strategy that seeks to explore embodied social and natural entanglements from the gendered and racialized subjects lived experiences, by bringing light to socioecological struggles in Latin American territories.

Paper long abstract:

Rural territories across Latin America are presently undergoing major socioecological shifts. Social struggles aimed at defending territories and a sense of place turn out critical in understanding various social and natural entanglements, chief among them the historical body, i.e. the epitome of these struggles. By enabling a conceptual dialogue among the political ecology of health, feminist geography, and the notion of body/territory used by community-based feminist activists we find theoretical grounds for spelling out how these territorial relations including class-, ethnicity-, gender-, and age-based struggles get somatized by these subjects. How to study these dynamics from an emancipatory, critical, and relevant methodological standpoint? This paper provides an account of a methodological strategy that seeks to explore these dynamics while avoiding any extractivistic or paternalistic rationale. These efforts involve an inquiry approach derived from participatory action-research methods, Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, grassroots-based art, social cartography, and body/territory mapping exercises to allow respondents to express how they feel about, perceive, and live in their territories. By doing so, we found that participants have a deep, complex, and emotional connection with their territories that depends on their collective and individual identities. This connection transcends a dichotomic view between their bodies and territories, as they relate their biographies with socioecological disputes. Our empirical evidence stems from fieldwork conducted in La Libertad, Petén –a town close to the Mexican border in Guatemala–, and a K’iche’ community located in the western highlands and its struggle to preserve their forests.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

We explore some of the key dimensions of relationality, such as more than human perspectives, unfolding relations, and socionature justice to delve into key insights, lines of flight and radical pathways for theory and praxis in the global North, as well as South.

Paper long abstract:

Relationality plays a pivotal role in emerging contemporary critical social sciences, humanities and arts, but continues to have relatively limited traction in environmental sustainability and development studies. We explore some of the key dimensions of relationality, such as more than human perspectives, unfolding relations, and socionature justice to explore key insights, lines of flight and radical pathways for theory and praxis in the global North, as well as South. There is fruitful ground for unsettling sustainability sciences and development approaches by amplifying currently marginal perspectives, such as those offered by relationality and critical social sciences. We analyse how marginal perspectives and disciplines can support resistances to orthodoxies and hegemonies, expanding specific sets of relations and rhizomatic expansions in senses of selves and place, and in notions of community, temporalities, (in)visibilities and accountabilities. This paper explores: (i) how relational perspectives can support the unlearning and undoing of dominant discourses and practices in relation to sustainability ( (iii) how relational perspectives can advance socionature justice and repair. We draw upon research and community arts engagements on imaginaries and future-making in Guatemala, Kenya, and the UK.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

Indigenous food sovereignty movements have achieved political change in Guatemala at the level of the nation-state. The paper focuses on more-than-human agency as implicit to the movement.

Paper long abstract:

Beyond just Maya or Indigenous movements in the Indigenous land of Iximulew, more-than-human Indigenous perspectives have entered the mainstream political discourse of Guatemala, the nation-state. This article orients the 2024 political change in Guatemala as rooted in Indigenous, grassroots, more-than-human social movements that demand restorative justice in their processes of rematriation that are fundamentally political as they decolonize from global structural systems of inequality. Pairing Lorena Cabnal’s decolonial feminismo comunitário (literal translation ‘communitarian feminism’), a decolonial feminist theoretical frame from Iximulew, with mobilizations of Indigenous ‘defensa del territorio’ struggles around Guatemala, I argue that more-than-human networks are the foundation and shared ground for Guatemala’s ‘new spring’, germinating within the election of the Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement) political party. Linking Indigenous theory with the material and communal lifeways of buen vivir, practiced campesin@-a-campesin@ (Holt-Giménez 2006), I take a transect of the Indigenous food sovereignty movement to show how rematriation processes of Indigenous Pueblos such as the Maya Ixil resist neoliberal interests commodifying and selling their ancestral lands and their life systems while at the same time creating the same networks and knowledge systems that have become a fertile ground for seeding larger political and social change. The democratic election of Arévalo and the Movimiento Semilla brings together Maya cosmologies with land reform in a politics of restorative justice that shows how a diversity of actors have been able to mobilize agencies of the living economy to self-organize and self-actualize the material processes and platforms needed to decolonize and confront oppressive power structures in the performance of feminismo comunitario’s shared goal of equality.