- Convenors:
-
Ayesha Vemuri
(McGill University)
Zahra Moloo (University of Toronto)
Dalia Zein (Tampere University)
Danna Masad (Tampere University)
Wassim Ghantous (Tampere University)
- Format:
- Panel
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.
Accepted papers
Presentation short abstract
In Cameroon, human rights discourses mobilized by conservation actors has reduced physical violence, but extended epistemic violence toward indigenous Baka people. Violence enables forests to function as production sites, rather than places of social relationships inhabited by the Baka.
Presentation long abstract
For many years, WWF-funded rangers were accused of extraordinary forms of physical violence toward indigenous people in national parks across the world, including in Cameroon’s Lobéké, Boumba Bek and Nki national parks (Warren and Baker, 2019; Survival International, 2016). These incidents of physical violence diminished with the signing of a 2019 Memorandum of Understanding between Cameroon’s Ministry of Forests and Wildlife (MINFOF) and a Baka indigenous organization, ASBABUK, renewed in 2023. Nevertheless, other forms of violence persist. In this paper, I will explore how conservation actors in Cameroon appropriate the language and discourse of human rights in ways that reduce physical violence toward the Baka, but extend and deepen forms of epistemic violence. Access is subject to temporal and spatial restrictions as well as regimes of control and legibility. These operate as a form of biopower, cutting the Baka off from their life worlds in the forest (Foucault, 1976). At the same time, many decades of physical violence have left their own imprint: violence takes own its own autonomy and many Baka do not go to the forest out of fear that violence of the past will occur again (Feldman, 21). The imprint of violence remains, operating as a form of discipline to keep the Baka out of the forests and to maintain these spaces as zones of production rather than as the Baka inhabit them, as places of social relationships and alternative spatial and temporal rhythms.
Presentation short abstract
This presentation examines how the conservation zone of Kaziranga is made possible through risk and speculative logics that necessitate the eviction and dispossession of Indigenous communities, and how Indigenous communities develop models of counter-speculation and conservation in turn.
Presentation long abstract
In this presentation, I examine the case of the Kaziranga National Park in Assam, India as a site where militarised conservation, Indigenous counter-resistance, and speculative infrastructure development converge. As an important symbol of Assamese nationalism, a celebrated national park, and a UNESCO world heritage site, Kaziranga emerges as a unique site of national and international care, financialised support, and militarised protection against ecological harm, including not only poaching and hunting, but also increased flooding and erosion. In recent years, as devastating floods threaten the park and its celebrated resident, the one-horned rhinoceros, the Indian state has responded with infrastructural-led promises to protect and extend the park. However, such measures, from embankments to sluice gates, and wildlife conservation corridors to park expansion plans, necessitate the eviction, displacement, and dispossession of Indigenous Mising communities and their traditional lands and livelihood. This presentation examines the ways in which the expansion of the conservation zone constitutes infrastructure-driven colonialism undergirded by speculative finance and risk logics, and counters them with speculative conservation models based in Indigenous epistemologies and histories.
Presentation short abstract
The paper revives silenced histories and world-making practices in Deir Alla to expose and unmake imperial and Zionist settler-colonial myths. Using mixed media and critical cartography, it recenters indigenous relational knowledge to imagine anticolonial, life-affirming futures.
Presentation long abstract
Social, ecological, and spatial injustices in Deir Alla -a province in the Jordan Valley- emerge from long histories of imperial and Zionist settler-colonial violence perpetuated through capitalist and modernist systems. While these formations manifest-in and transform our material world, they also rest on hegemonic myths, invading our perception and delimiting our ways of being. Following Sylvia Wynter’s invitation to “unmake” and “remake” our world(s), this work situates agency in practices of remembering, and carefully selecting from collective memory as a means of restor(y)ing suppressed narratives and practices.
This re-narration recognizes the ongoing erasure of indigenous life-worlds in Bilad Al-Sham and illuminates relational ontologies that prove to be recalcitrant to obliteration. Those seen through daily and organized efforts in Deir Alla—primarily women-led—that counter colonial-capitalist ruptures. This remaking praxis is seen as reworlding forms reactivating repressed indigenous knowledge-systems. Such forms endure by exceeding the material forms, persisting through intangible, embodied, and relational modes of doing and being with human and non-human worlds.
By foregrounding alternative ontological frames and reactivating memory as a method, and grounded in Soja’s spatial theorization of justice, the paper employs critical cartography with creative methods revealing these dynamics. Thus, challenging dominant historiographies of the Jordan Valley and proposing a renewed interpretive space in which indigenous values and ecological attunement can be re-centered. In doing so, it argues for an anticolonial re-making of narratives and geographies that recognize the vitality of what has been silenced and suppressed and opens possibilities for more just and life-affirming futures.
Presentation short abstract
Drawing on the experiences of displaced individuals from nine different villages across the Southern Lebanese border, this paper examines the possibilities and promises that tending to ecological remnants, in the shape of trees, gardens, and farmlands, holds amidst uninhabitable worlds.
Presentation long abstract
This paper examines how ecologies of living (Khayyat 2022) persist amidst uninhabitable worlds (Simone 2015) in Southern Lebanese border villages. Ongoing Israeli colonial violence in the region since October 2023 —despite a ceasefire agreement entering effect in November 2024 —has especially impacted life on the borders, leading to the internal displacement of an estimated 82,000 people, and the near-complete destruction of more than thirty villages, rendering them unlivable. Drawing on the experiences of displaced individuals from nine different villages across the borderland, I ask: what possibilities and promises does ecological life, in the shape of trees, gardens, and farmlands, hold amidst displacement and ruination?
This inquiry is based on semi-structured interviews which were conducted between April and June 2025. Capturing events taking place six months into the ‘ceasefire’, at the time when the interviews were held, the research documents how the displaced who retain a connection to their villages navigate fleeting returns under continuous bombardment, shelling, targeted assassinations, kidnappings, occupation, and the air striking and detonation of residential units. Dimming hopes of return and the ever-present impossibility of reconstruction compel the displaced to tend to ecological remnants under extreme conditions of insecurity and precarity. By bringing to the fore the meanings that the displaced attach to these acts of tending to ecologies, the paper seeks to stretch the conversation of struggle in South Lebanon beyond the narrative of resistance and to critically examine the boundary between rootedness and uprootedness, as well as between life and nonlife.
Presentation short abstract
This paper examines rhythms and ruptures in land-based pastoral practice as it persists through and against settler colonial violence in the occupied West Bank. By focusing on plants, water, and seasons, to show how shepherds and animals navigate settler colonialism’s endemic drive ‘out of season’
Presentation long abstract
This article examines rhythms and ruptures in Indigenous everyday land-based practices as they persist through and against settler colonial violence. Centering the praxis of pastoral communities in the occupied West Bank, it explores how shepherds and animals navigate the cyclical changes of plants, water, weather, and seasons amid volatile settler colonial geographies marked by displacement, fragmentation, compartmentalization, and environmental destruction. Grounded in ethnographic and embodied methods—including interviews with pastoral community members and walking with shepherds—the study draws on literature in vegetal geographies, atmospheres/weathers, settler colonial studies, and Indigenous studies. Focusing on three deeply entangled aspects central to pastoralism—plants, water, and seasons—it demonstrates how settler colonialism operates as a persistent disruption of elemental rhythms, an endemic force ‘out of season.’
Presentation short abstract
This paper presents a critical analysis of how fishing communities at Lake Turkana are struggling in a shifting landscape where climate change, state conservation, and market pressures converge. We show how Lake Turkana while being a World Heritage site is also a site of everyday struggle
Presentation long abstract
On Lake Turkana, fishermen describe their work as “a daily war,” caught precariously between Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) rangers, the highest water levels in two decades, and increasing human-crocodile conflict. This paper offers a critical political ecology analysis of how fishing communities struggle in a shifting landscape where climate change, state conservation, and market pressures converge. Years of climate-induced droughts have undermined pastoral livelihoods, pushing people toward the fishing villages, intensifying competition for declining fish stocks. Commercialization has accelerated, with Congolese traders now purchasing fish fry at an unsustainable rate for industrial processing abroad. Rising water levels further alter lake ecology and familiar fishing grounds, driving crocodiles closer to human settlements. These pressures unfold alongside the Kenyan state’s efforts to defend its green image by protecting Lake Turkana’s UNESCO World Heritage status. The endangered status of Lake Turkana National Park has prompted intensified monitoring and enforcement, resulting in increasingly violent confrontations between KWS and fishing communities. Although UNESCO promotes an image of peaceful and collaborative heritage protection, the reality on Lake Turkana is one of fear, harassment, coercion, and violence. By situating fishermen at the center of these intersecting dynamics, the paper shows how they navigate conflict, environmental change, and state violence. It also demonstrates how global conservation agendas, climate change, and market extraction intersect to produce everyday violence. Finally, it shows how communities navigate these overlapping forms of precarity while sustaining livelihoods on a lake that is both a World Heritage site and a site of everyday struggle.
Presentation short abstract
Dams and energy infrastructures exemplifies the neoliberal strategy of co-opting Indigenous knowledge systems into dominant techno-bureaucratic frameworks. Through co-optation environmental governance processes must delegitimize Indigenous and local epistemologies, with the goal of epistemicide.
Presentation long abstract
The integration of Indigenous and local knowledge systems into decision-making processes reflects a continuation of colonial legacies, ultimately striving to create a singular epistemic culture. Onto-epistemologically, neoliberalism transcends political and economic phenomenon towards an epistemological culture that perpetuates epistemicide through appropriating Indigenous and local knowledge systems in order to delegitimize them. Through development projects and environmental governance neoliberalism attempts to homogenize social and ecological landscapes undermining myriad ways of knowing and social modes of living.
This study investigates 'co-option' as a strategy that reinforces neoliberal dominance through an intricate interplay across coercion and collaboration. This often manifests in the use of proxy representations of Indigenous identities, leading to a form of delegitimization and managerialism that is obscured within techno-bureaucratic environmental governance. The argument here demonstrates how neoliberalism seeks to assimilate Indigenous and local knowledge systems into prevailing power structures.
The global large dams industry and the energy infrastructure in the Sakha Republic of Northern Siberia serve as case studies that exemplify the neoliberal strategy of integrating knowledge systems into dominant techno-bureaucratic frameworks, consequently suppressing and delegitimizing diverse perspectives through co-option.
Epistemicide emerges as a manifestation of such neoliberal organizational forms that aim to delegitimize the relationships inherent in non-anthropocentric onto-epistemological worldviews. This suppression of socio-ecological life ultimately leads to the demise of ways of being that center relationships with other-than-human beings, forms, and elements. The processes marked and analyzed in this scholarship underscore a deliberate separation and dissolution of connections with other-than-human constituents, which subsequently drive the commodification of "nature."
Presentation short abstract
This study argues Kayambi knowledge offers essential alternatives to dominant conservation and climate models for páramo management. Using feminist critique, it advocates for integrating Indigenous epistemologies into climate policy to advance equity and effective environmental governance
Presentation long abstract
The proposed paper delves into how Indigenous perspectives, particularly those of the Kayambi people in Northern Ecuador, offer vital contributions to páramo management—high-altitude grasslands essential for water supply and carbon sequestration—during the Anthropocene. By examining Kayambi’s ecological knowledge and practices, this study challenges the dominant IPCC climate models, advocating for a revision that integrates Indigenous and feminist perspectives. It explores how these perspectives not only address environmental issues but also confront epistemic, social, and ecological inequalities rooted in colonial histories of land dispossession. Through feminist critical discourse analysis and ethnographic work, this study emphasizes the knowledge encounters and confrontations, as well as the necessity of intercultural dialogue for addressing the marginalization of Indigenous knowledge in global climate models. Hence, this paper will discuss the intersection of Indigenous environmental knowledge, feminist frameworks, climate justice, and self-determination, advocating for the inclusion of Indigenous epistemologies in climate policy. It aims to contribute to a more equitable and inclusive climate justice discourse by rethinking conservation strategies through Indigenous and feminist lenses, and by amplifying the voices of Indigenous communities as essential actors in global biodiversity, conservation, and sustainability.
Presentation short abstract
This paper investigates the remaining and changing values of the finca (plot of land) in Quichua communities of the Ecuadorian Amazon. It argues for ethnographic approaches grounded in everyday events and informal conversations as key to accessing perceptions and values.
Presentation long abstract
This paper investigates the changing values of the finca (plot of land) in Indigenous (Quichua) communities of the Ecuadorian Amazon. While initial strategies based on interviews and observation proved insufficient to capture these values, new insights emerged when the Municipality proposed relocating the inhabitants of Vicente Salazar away from their fincas in exchange for electricity provision. Spontaneous, repeated conversations around this event revealed how the finca is understood as place, livelihood, and activity, and how these meanings are shifting in the face of extractivism, urbanisation, and land commodification. Comparisons with the city and nearby villages further illuminate these dynamics: the city is depicted as crowded, noisy, and a place where one must pay for everything, while the community and finca provide space, autonomy, and subsistence “for free.” Yet younger generations increasingly describe the finca as boring, aspiring instead to wage labour and urban life. These contrasts show how values of land, money, and work are intertwined with conceptions of the good life, and how ontological problems (e.g., having to pay for everything) get reframed as technical issues (e.g., lack of money). Methodologically, the paper argues for ethnographic approaches grounded in everyday events and informal conversations as key to accessing perceptions and values that are otherwise unconscious, implicit, or simply difficult to articulate.