Short Abstract

Can the concept of landscape provide a meeting ground for interdisciplinary approaches to environmental dynamics in Africa? This panel brings different approaches, methods and forms of evidence into dialogue to explore human and nonhuman relations and the spatialities they produce.

Long Abstract

Although interdisciplinarity has become increasingly prominent within the environmental humanities, exchanges often remain concentrated within the humanities and social sciences. African environmental history has long recognised the importance of broader dialogue, including with environmental sciences and other fields (Carruthers, 2006). Addressing environmental dynamics in Africa requires bringing distinct questions, approaches, methods, and forms of evidence into relation.

Despite remaining a contested concept, landscape offers a productive meeting ground for this endeavour. Relational approaches have emphasized how heterogeneous human and nonhuman associations produce fluid and multiple spatialities (Whatmore, 2002; Allen, 2011). Those new perspectives shift attention from landscape as a passive setting towards a dynamic field of relations, while questioning predetermined scales; strict spatial divisions such as local/global or rural/urban; and supposedly rigid dichotomies between human and non-human actors.

The panel seeks to explore what becomes visible when different disciplinary approaches and forms of evidence encounter one another through the concept of landscape. We invite empirically grounded contributions from across the humanities, social, natural, and applied sciences examining environmental dynamics in Africa. Papers may address, for example, how different forms of resource use intersect in reshaping environments and livelihoods; how human and nonhuman actors participate in these processes; how transformations connect places, scales, and temporalities; and how their consequences are unevenly distributed across local populations.

Echoing “African Prisms,” the theme for ECAS 2027, the panel seeks to bring different approaches, methods, forms of evidence, and expertise into dialogue to develop more integrated accounts of African environmental dynamics.

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