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- Convenors:
-
Petr Gibas
(Department of Environmental Studies, Faculty of social studies, Masaryk University)
Karel Šima (Charles University in Prague)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 6 College Park (6CP), 0G/007
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Resilience has been employed but also critiqued across numerous disciplines. Against the backdrop of resilience understood as individualized and/or systemic, the panel seeks to critically engage with it through the prism of more-than-human entanglements and the dynamics these entail and reveal.
Long Abstract:
The concept of resilience has been employed but also critiqued across numerous disciplines, including anthropology as well as human geography, psychology and sociology. In spite of being coined in and taken up by from natural sciences and ecological/environmental studies, resilience is often thought of by social scientists as well as politicians and development practitioners through the prism of human individuals, communities and institutions on one hand, or social-ecological systems on the other. Against this backdrop, the panel seeks to open up novel avenues of critical engagement with the concept by more closely looking at the role of more-than-human agentic relationships and entanglements. As the role of non-humans as well as the more-than-human hybridity of the "human" and the "social" have been made evident - yet again - by the onset of the COVID19 pandemic and the exacerbation of climate change, more-than-human entanglements ever more importantly challenge our scholarly practice and engagement. The panel assembles contributions that creatively respond to the challenge while engaging critically with resilience. Can we productively employ nuanced exploration of more-than-human relations in which humans, communities and institutions are suspended and challenged to rethink resilience? Can the notion of resilience be mobilized to understand the ever-shifting dynamics of socio-natural relations when we are faced with profound and complex societal transformations and sudden as well as long-term crises and their impacts on a variety of scales? Or does our exploration of more-than-human entanglements in crises discard the concept of resilience in favour of other concepts?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
On November 3, 2020 voters in Colorado, USA ushered in a new more-than-human resiliency paradigm of wildlife management: ‘democratic conservation’. This exercise of democratic power is the first known case of a nonhuman animal species’ reintroduction via a statutory ballot initiative.
Paper long abstract:
On 3 November 2020 voters in Colorado, USA ushered in a new paradigm of wildlife management: ‘democratic conservation’. More than 3,000,000 Coloradans narrowly voted to pass Proposition 114 to reintroduce the gray wolf (Canis lupus) to the state (Brasch 2020a) in an example of multispecies socio-political resiliency. This exercise of democratic power is the first known case where a coalition of citizens and nonprofit organizations led a grass-roots effort to bypass state and federal legislation to demand a nonhuman animal species’ reintroduction via a statutory ballot initiative. The outcome is bittersweet for environmental and wolf advocates: on October 29th, 2020 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department (USFWD) controversially decided to end federal support for the wolf by delisting the species from the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), turning over management to local and state officials (Rott 2020). Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) is now required to develop a plan to manage the species’ return based on statewide public hearings and scientific data, and to initiate ‘paws on the ground’ west of the Continental Divide by December 31, 2023. Wildlife management and policy is a contentious global issue, rife with competing values and tragic histories of violence against indigenous peoples and nonhuman animals, as well as favoring particular special interest groups. In this paper, we take a subaltern, posthumanist, and decolonial ecological perspective to consider the rights and perspectives of subaltern groups related to environmental conservation and examine the potential of this new democratic conservation paradigm for more-than-human resiliency.
Paper short abstract:
Resilience of beekeeping in southwestern Spain is based on the practice of transhumance and the relative value of different beehive locations around Spain. This livelihood is however threatened by climate change, invasive parasites and the intensive practices of modern beekeeping.
Paper long abstract:
Beekeeping in Extremadura, Spain differs from beekeeping in other parts of Europe by its sheer industrial scale and the practice of transhumance. Like many rural livelihoods, transhumant beekeeping in Spain is being threatened by climate change, and more particularly invasive parasitic mite Varroa destructor.
This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a small rural village of Fuenlabrada de los Montes in Extremadura, home to one of the largest communities of beekeepers in Europe. Although the village is small, it functions as a central hub in a vast network of beehive sites located all around South-Western Spain. Every year tens of thousands of hives are transported between these different locations in search of best blooms and favourable conditions. This paper demonstrates how the resilience of transhumant beekeeping is tied to the shifting relative value of these locations where beehives are being kept, and how this value is determined by numerous distinct logics, whether ecological, economic, bureaucratic or social.
In recent years the effects of climate change and erratic weather, combined with the effects of intensifying modern beekeeping practices, have made the problem of Varroa destructor significantly worse for Extremaduran beekeepers. The resilience of transhumance is being threatened by the spatially homogenizing effect of omnipresence of Varroa in all parts of Spain. Where do you go when location stops making a difference? Are there ways forward where humans, bees and mites could cohabit in Extremadura without destroying the livelihoods of beekeepers?
Paper short abstract:
This paper describes research into the potential for using RNA viruses as a metaphor and model to better understand the role of diversity in resilience and the role of diversity in long-term existential success. It is based on a research project between a virologist and an artist.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reflects on a collborative research project between virologist and Reader in Vector Ecology at Keele University, Dr Naomi Forrester-Soto, and Assoc Prof Dr Alana Jelinek, artist and theorist of art, an inter-disciplinary researcher with social anthropologists among others (member of EASA since 2012). We are researching the potential for using RNA viruses as a metaphor and model to better understand the role of diversity in resilience and the role of diversity in long-term existential success. Critique of existing and perhaps cynical uses of 'resilience' as neoliberal panacea for structural inequalities and exploitation is avoided, we believe, when the question of resilience is reframed through the lens of diversity, which is necessarily not situated in individuals but instead in communities. We turn to the most cutting-edge knowledge about RNA virus replication to look at the question of resilience. This paper describes virus ecologies and the entanglement between viruses, their vectors and their hosts to celebrate the success of viruses, not in terms of pandemic, but in terms of the diversity and creativity at the heart of a virus's strategy to thrive and evolve. Study of RNA viruses and their reliance on diversity and creativity for replication provides potential insight into how we might support real resilience through diversity in communities of both humans and non-human species.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on post-humanist insights, we look at mushrooms as non-human others and ask how to explore non-human entanglements (of and around mushrooms) in order to enhance the notion of resilience without reverting to thinking in terms of analogies (and metaphors).
Paper long abstract:
Within social sciences, mushrooms have been studied in relation to their cultural, societal and economic roles by both ethnomycology and anthropology. Fungi, as omnipresent and resilient organisms have also been picked up as exemplary within imaginaries of resilience alongside other non-humans. Fungi, especially in the form of mushrooms, have often been conceived by anthropologists and other social scientist as a part of natural-technological networks that open new ways of creating sustainable economies and environments and to envision how to live and survive on a damaged planet. For example, mushrooms have been placed within the commodity chains and used to explore the more-than-human properties of existing and emerging political economies and to (re)frame academic and public responses to the many challenges of Anthropocene. In our paper, we seek to interrogate the ways, in which mushrooms – as one of many types of resilient organisms – function in relation to the idea and imaginary of resilience. We explore the properties of mushrooms in (not only) academic accounts and show that despite the move towards the living materiality of fungi, they are often evoked in analogous terms; drawing on post-humanist insights (about more-than-human entanglements and ongoing intra-acting), we look at mushrooms as non-human others rather than as samples or examples. Are there ways of thinking resilience through non-humans without reverting to analogy (i.e. examples and metaphors)? If so, how can we explore non-human entanglements (of and around mushrooms) in order to enhance the notion of resilience.