Format/Structure

Roundtable discussion, with short interventions from some of the book's editors and authors and 1-2 discussants.

Long Abstract

This roundtable discussion introduces and provides critical commentaries on the book "Insurgent Ecologies: Between environmental struggles and postcapitalist transformations" (Fernwood, 2024), collectively edited by Undisciplined Environments. "Insurgent Ecologies" engages with longstanding conversations in both academic and movement-based political ecology around how to advance changes in, against and beyond capitalism, to make way for a just and livable world. It starts from the belief that the panoply of subaltern environmental struggles taking place across global South and North to defend territories against the assault of extractive capitalism in its multiple manifestations, are today a necessary component of such transformations. The issue of systemic change, and of strategic organizing to implement such a change, has long been something of a blind spot of academic political ecology, which this book aspires to redress. Yet, radical environmental movements have forced these issues to the centre of the political agenda — shaking academic researchers out of the comfort zone of abstract critique. The book presents 16 unique stories of the visions and strategies of struggles, organized around sovereignty, land, climate, feminisms, and labour, from a wide diversity of contexts: Palestine and Kurdistan, the United States, Puerto Rico, Ecuador and Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, South Africa, Turkey, Georgia, Spain, Italy, and Greece, as well as transnational spaces. These stories shed light on how a radical, unified, revolutionary politics can emerge from place-based, often disconnected environmental struggles. Each one reflects on how to build counterhegemonic articulations through practices of alliance, solidarity and comradeship across diverse struggles, and how, through such articulations, new political subjects and transformative collective projects are created.