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This paper introduces an approach to transform North-South academic collaborations. Critiquing entrenched dynamics in inter-university collaborations, we offer a testimonial contribution of a methodology to unlearning colonial modes of thinking and relating. Introducing transformative dialogues, the paper illustrates how researchers can engage in a joint process of self-reflection and mutual accountability to challenge established norms in academia. Through autoethnographic vignettes, we demonstrate the complexities and possibilities of unsettling power dynamics and fostering collective coexistence across difference.

Transformative dialogues provide an opportunity to transform interpersonal relations and individual’s subjectivities by creating a space for tuning in with each other. They help (1) to reflect on our past and present experiences, (2) to change the way we perceive some of our work relations, and (3) to confront us with our complicity in reproducing neocolonial power dynamics in academia. As such, transformative dialogues turn a self-centric understanding of subject-formation founded on self-reflexivity in academia into a relational and dialogical process of exchange among peers across the North-South divide. This, so we hope, can form the basis of a profound transformation of the way we think and work in academic collaborations.

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The current environmental crisis, generated by the accelerated changes experienced in the earth system from 1950 (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000) (Steffen, 2004, 2015), has a close relationship with the conceptions and valuations of nature, especially which has promoted the use of natural resources in the market. Therefore, it is an urgent task to review, question, dismantle and reconstruct the conceptions and assessments of nature, which have served as the basis for our actions on the planet.

In relation to this broad and complex task, the paper will make some interpretive and critical contributions, through the integration of some contributions from three lines of analysis that have very little intersected. Specifically, 1) Lorraine Daston's (1998) ontological historical analysis of the way in which a unified metaphysical conception of the idea of order in nature was normalized in the Enlightenment; 2) with the explanation, from political ecology, of the way in which this conception came to be constituted in the current “modern world system”, especially through the impulse of modern industrial capitalism, from authors such as Wallerstein (1979), and Moore, (2020). 3) And the explanation of how this metaphysical and capitalist conception of nature spread and was widely imposed from colonial and decolonial processes, based on the contributions made by current decolonial studies.

References:

Daston & Park (1998). Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. Zone Books.

Moore (2016). Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. PM Press.

Wallerstein (2006) Análisis de sistemas-mundo. Una introducción. Siglo XXI Editores

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In a political scenario of high pressure on indigenous peoples in Brazil, it becomes evident that modes of cultivation and agricultural production are at the epicenter of disputes, since agribusiness and the idea of development it promotes have been one of the political banners of successive governments and are at the center of territorial disputes. The Guarani Kaiowá carry out their reclaimings in seas of transgenic soy. Transgenic corns cross-pollinate and sterilize heirloom varieties. The industrial planting of Acacia mangium in Roraima affects the soils and water of Macuxi and Wapichana territories, threatening the food sovereignty of these peoples. The Kalipety reclamation, carried out by the Guarani Mbya in the South zone of São Paulo, had as one of its central actions the planting of a diversity of traditional crops in a land devastated by eucalyptus monoculture. These are some of the stories I intend to explore to reflect on how a war of worlds is waged with vegetal allies, with the materiality of each species relevant and fundamental to understanding these cosmopolitical disputes.

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Deploying so-called ‘new genomic techniques’ like CRISPR-Cas9, a wide range of ‘super-creatures’ are being developed and promoted by powerful corporations, influential scientists, modern nation-states, and international governance institutions. These ‘super-creatures’ include big muscular animals, toxin-releasing plants, and root- and stem-boosting carbon-storage crops. They are argued to be essential for realising climate resilience and sustainability.

Reviewing patent applications, academic presentations, research proposals and promotional materials, we analyse the narratives developed by promoters of super-creatures in terms of the practical worlds they aim to engineer. A range of social movements and activists criticise genetic engineers’ and promoters’ focus on individual organisms to build resilience and sustainability. Criticisms focus on the neglect of organisms’ ecological embeddedness and of radical uncertainties. Focusing on individual organisms is also seen as directing attention away from the wider political formations that need transforming in struggles for sustainability. Critical among such formations are considered agro-industrial complexes, socio-technical regimes, and plantation capitalism.

It is to this conceptual mix that we add colonial modernity as a globally hegemonic formation to be transformed for sustainability (Arora and Stirling 2023). We show how the practical worlds aimed through the development of super-creatures assume comprehensive superiority of ‘modern’ ways of knowing over diverse alternatives; assert military supremacies in the name of security; extend imaginations of control, expand toxic extractions, and enforce gendered dominations . Without dismantling such constituting dimensions, modernity will keep engineering colonial ‘super-futures’ to marginalise alternative sustainabilities of peasant farmers, Indigenous peoples, and agroecologists.

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This presentation articulates the Asian American naturecultural landscapes within Ruth Ozeki’s novel, A Tale for the Time Being (2013), in seeking speculative “ways home” that refuse to perpetuate systems of settler colonialism and resist structures of alienation. Critical Asian American settler colonial studies has emerged through the work of scholars such as Haunani-Kay Trask and Candace Fujikane, who investigate the utilization of settler colonial structures by Asian American communities to continue the dispossession of the Kanaka Maoli in Hawai’i. Through critical attention to Asian American naturecultures, I describe a broader and entrenched understanding of the effects of settler colonialism on the North American landscape. Furthermore, the systems of settler colonialism that dually silence indigenous being and alienate Asian American beings from the landscape are traced beyond the human body and into oysters, bamboo, wolves, and other beings. Thus, I present the need for a more-than-human transformation of Asian American settler colonial participation. The final section of this article explores how the Jungle Crow invites critical yet hopeful speculation of futurities that focus on finding reciprocal and respectful kinship between naturecultural Asian American settlers and indigenous communities. In “seeing the way home”, this article urges transformative praxes of migration that are disentangled from normative settler colonial narratives. Thus, this presentation urges for novel praxes of settling, which not only refutes the settler colonial project but seeks restorative justice through envisioning shared futures.

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This paper is a continuation of my ongoing research that works to unsettle sites of leisure in the settler-colonial nation state of Canada. My work positions the cabin as a form of media and traces its historical development in a localized Canadian context. Once facilitating colonial expansion across the country, the cabin now contributes to settler-colonial logics that naturalize processes of settling. Deploying research-creation methodologies, my upcoming work will produce a collaborative auto-ethnographic and ethnographic documentary film that will be structured as a land acknowledgment to intervene in the standardized and passive form they have taken in educational institutions today (Robinson et al. 2019).

This paper will extend my previous research by discussing how cabins are tied to the logging industry of the 19th and 20th centuries—resource extraction that was fueled by British merchants. During this time, logs were shipped from eastern Canada to Europe across the Atlantic on large rafts. I will discuss my ancestor’s involvement in this industry, our shifting relationship to cabins over time in relation to logging, and documentary film’s potential in producing anticolonial methods for unmaking. Specifically, I will discuss how documentary film may intervene in rote “decolonial” rituals that offer a promise of undoing colonial harms, but often fail to produce such effects.

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As a movement that originated through a coalition between labour and environmental justice groups, Just Transition aims to include workers and marginalized communities in the transition towards a low-carbon economy (Stevis &Felli, 2015).

However, in Canada, dominant Just Transition policies and calls-to-action tend to focus on how workers and communities may benefit from more ‘sustainable’ jobs and economies (Mertins-Kirkwood & Deshpande, 2019), rather than addressing the deeper socio-economic transformations needed for labour and environmental justice (Dobrusin, 2021; Ciplet, 2022). As suggested by Dobrusin (2021), Just Transition can potentially drive these transformations, particularly through efforts that “mobilize through the margins”.

To explore this concept, this study examines migrant justice organizing in Toronto, a migrant-led movement that empowers workers in precarious positions to lead and define advocacy efforts (Migrant Justice Network, n.d.). Semi-structured interviews with staff and organizers from grassroots and service-based migrant organizations reveal common approaches to addressing community needs, and forming alliances with other causes and groups for mutual aid and collective advocacy. This study aims to inform Just Transition organizing by emphasizing the importance of centering marginalized workers and communities to lead and mobilize actions that challenge colonial systems and industries, ultimately advancing labour and environmental justice.

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This paper delves into the intricate dynamics of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), examining how their interaction (or the failure thereof) is shaped by a systems logic. Embedding this Luhmannian systems theory perspective into theories of modernity, we analyse the embedded systemic structures within these institutions, highlighting the efforts and inherent difficulties of going beyond the logic of scientific and political systems shaped by a Eurocentric conception of modernity.

Our study, informed by interviews with IPCC scientists and UNFCCC negotiators and complemented by observations at the World Climate Conferences, uncovers the systemic challenges in reconciling the linear, Eurocentric logic that dominates these systems. We find that while there is a growing intention within these bodies to diversify knowledge inputs and overcome historical biases, the entrenched systems-logic of both scientific and political frameworks within the IPCC and UNFCCC presents significant barriers. These barriers not only hinder the integration of diverse knowledge systems but also impede meaningful co-production between knowledge holders including scientists, and policymakers.

Our paper contributes to the critical discourse on environmental governance, illustrating the complexities of deconstructing Eurocentric modernity within global sustainability institutions. We argue for a transformative approach that challenges the existing systems-logic of the IPCC and UNFCCC, advocating for a more inclusive framework that genuinely values and incorporates diverse ways of knowing and being.