Format/Structure

Non-traditional panel that includes both academic and artistic presentations using textual, visual, sonic, and experimental media.

Long Abstract

This panel examines narratives and practices shaping ecological relations and conservation in contexts marked by colonial and racial violence. In both settler colonial and “post” colonial states, Indigenous life is often narrated through the lens of elimination, enclosure, and capitalist extraction. We aim to surface how Indigenous and other marginalized communities persist in their material, affective, and spiritual relations to land, water, and nonhuman life, even amid militarization, policing, and ecological devastation. By juxtaposing analyses of conservation as a technology of racialized control with accounts of refusal and endurance, the panel creates space to connect across contexts and build solidarities amidst intensifying planetary and colonial violence.

Amid settler-colonial expansion, military aggression, and the occupation of land, communities develop refusal strategies to navigate these violent conditions, preserving their livelihoods and homes, and remaining connected to the land. Conservation is often framed as a necessary response to planetary crisis in the so-called “Anthropocene.” Yet in the Global South it is often enacted through militarization, enclosure, and racial capitalism. Conservation narratives obscure or enable dispossession while authorizing new forms of epistemic and material violence. Simultaneously, Indigenous and community-based practices reveal alternative ontologies and epistemologies that contest these logics and open possibilities for other futures. We ask: How do ecological crises and conservation narratives justify racialized violence in conservation practice? How can grounded and embodied “living” knowledge illuminate ways that communities reimagine ecological relations through alternative epistemologies?

We welcome scholarly, artistic, and non-traditional contributions from diverse geographical and disciplinary contexts to engage and expand Indigenous, anticolonial, and feminist political ecologies.. Countering the positional superiority of Western knowledge (Smith, 1999), the panel privileges work by Indigenous and non-Western scholars committed to research within their own communities. We aim to foster cross-boundary solidarities, mobilization, and collective action in a time of intensified genocidal colonial violence.

This Panel has 6 pending paper proposals.
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