Format/Structure

This will be a 5-6 person panel, while designed in person we would be open to hybrid to accommodate scholars not receiving visas.

Long Abstract

From the Atlantic Slave Trade to 20th century urbanisation, where and how we live today is deeply shaped by histories of migration and displacement over the last 300 years. This has taken many forms such as labour migration, marriage migration, forced migration and development-induced displacement. Migration and displacement, thus, are a complicated and dynamic process.

At the centre of the migration and displacement processes lies human-environmental relations shaped by institutions of colonialism, capitalism and modernist ideologies and the accompanying restructuring of social relations. Political Ecology (PE) has engaged with migration while countering environmentally determinist, a-political and alarmist descriptions of climatic or environmental displacements. Since its inception, PE has engaged with human mobility, though mobility has rarely been central to the field. Yet mobility is a central process to most areas of interest to PE, such as agrarian transition, resource management, environmental change, and conservation. While early PE research examined the political economy of household migration, more studies are needed to examine migration and displacement as an inherent component of broader social and developmental contexts without ignoring its heterogeneity.

Furthermore, broader migration scholarship centres liberal and individual conceptions of migration employing economic-driven models, such as push-and-pull, and New Economics of Labor Migration which elides sustained engagement with the structural, historical and socio-ecological context in which migration happens.

This panel moves beyond discussions of climatic displacements to explore a broadly defined political ecology of migration which centres experiences of land, livelihood and resources in migration. This intersects with recent discussions of migration attentive to the ways in which broader structures of capitalism, colonialism and modernisation shape migration. This panel will seek to find commonalities in diverse migrations that build a future for political ecologies of migration that moves beyond a narrow engagement with narratives of climate.

This Panel has 11 pending paper proposals.
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