Contribution short abstract

This presentation reflects on my process of gathering a theoretical framework, the construction of a research design, and the challenges of fieldwork, while remaining consequential with nurturing critical dialogues and navigating epistemic conflicts.

Contribution long abstract

As a researcher working in political ecology of conservation strategies, I acknowledge that these strategies can perpetuate social, political, and historical structures rooted in colonial legacies. As a Peruvian biologist and conservation practitioner after almost 15 years of professional experience, the previous statement feels extremely familiar and painfully underwritten. As I embark on my PhD journey in a European University, critical questions and reflections around my own practice and approach emerge. It is known that significant epistemic conflicts surface when there is a lack of critical dialogue between key knowledge- and stake-holders in conservation and human-nature relationships (Petriello & Stronza, 2020; Shanee, 2019; Zhang et al., 2023). So how do I make sure that my research is part of that critical dialogue? I acknowledge that my approach to it is crossed by my training, my life experience, my gender, my language and culture, my attachment to a territory and, specially, my willingness to attain an advance academic degree. Therefore, while planning and doing my research I have been trying to remain conscious of what I felt was invisible in conservation practice. This presentation reflects about my own process of gathering a theoretical framework, the construction of a research design, and the challenges of fieldwork. I am willing to share how my practice is constantly challenged by the context and political decisions. This presentation is an attempt to remain consequential with nurturing critical dialogues and navigating epistemic conflicts.

Contribution short abstract

This contribution offers a reflexive account of how a Malagasy woman scientist’s identity, privilege, and positionality shape her practice of Political Ecology within North–South research collaborations.

Contribution long abstract

Political Ecology has long interrogated power, knowledge, and the uneven geographies of environmental governance, yet researchers remain deeply embedded in the very colonial structures we critique. Drawing from my trajectory as a Malagasy scholar working in a North-South setting for more than a decade, this contribution offers a reflexive exploration of how my identity, privilege, and positionality shape my practice of Political Ecology. I examine how my location, culturally, institutionally, and geopolitically, conditions the research questions, concepts, methodologies, and collaborations I am able to pursue, the territories to which I gain (or am denied) access, and the expectations that accompany my presence in both Global South struggles and Global North research systems.

Grounded in reflexive methodology, I discuss the tensions that arise when attempting to enact decolonial values in practice: negotiating power asymmetries within North-South research collaborations, confronting the limits of participatory ideals when structural inequalities and historical justice persist, and navigating institutional demands for evidence-based outputs. These experiences illustrate the political work that positionality performs, not as a static declaration, but as an ongoing negotiation that shapes relationships, concepts and methodologies, and the ethics of knowledge production.

I argue for a framework of positionality that is embodied, situated, and transformative. One that moves beyond methodological self-reflection toward concrete practices of accountability, reciprocity, and epistemic pluralism. Such an approach, I suggest, can help repoliticize Political Ecology and support more just knowledge production and relational research collaborations, particularly in contexts where local and Indigenous governance are central to environmental futures.

Contribution short abstract

How does one engage with concepts of power and justice in practicing Political Ecology as a Global South researcher studying in a Global North context?

Contribution long abstract

How does one engage with questions of power and justice in practicing Political Ecology as a Global South researcher studying in a Global North context? I am a PhD candidate from Nepal, employed at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), studying adaptive water governance of a Norwegian lake. With a background in intersectional gender studies and political ecology, issues of power, justice and equality have been central to my work. Thus, researching a context that is often portrayed as one of the closest realizations of an egalitarian society poses interesting possibilities. While Nordic Political Ecology has been discussed and practiced since mid-2000s by primarily Nordic scholars, in this presentation, I want to explore how a researcher of my identity and positionality can engage with PE in a Global North context. This includes reflections on how my embodiment and situated knowledge affects the research questions I choose to ask, the methodologies I choose to answer them with, and the power dynamics involved in the interactions with my informants which can diverge from traditional researcher–informant hierarchy. I also want to explore how I work with feminist research philosophies in my doctoral research without engaging with concepts of gender. Lastly, I want to examine how my practice of PE may create possibilities of challenging hegemonic academic knowledge production. In addition to presenting my thoughts and ideas, I look forward to learning how other researchers have engaged with the topics I am grappling with.

Contribution short abstract

Our contribution is a reflexive account of using body-territory methods with rivers and river defenders as Global South researchers in Global North academia, examining care for rivers, activist-scholar tensions, and the risks of translating decolonial methods into (Anglophone) academic spaces.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution reflects on the methodological and political tensions of doing research with cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) cartographies in the Arenal River in Colombia and the Dílar-Monachil Rivers in Spain while being researchers from the Global South situated within a Global North university. Body-territory, grounded in Indigenous and communitarian feminist genealogies from Abya Yala, has increasingly entered Anglophone political ecology. Yet its widespread circulation risks epistemic extraction: erasing the historico-political struggles that produced it and neutralizing its decolonial force. We reflect on how we have navigated this risk conceptually, ethically, and affectively, while conducting collaborative research with river defenders.

Drawing from workshops with river dwellers whose everyday care practices sustain river–body–territory continuums, we examine not only how people enact care, but how we learn to care as activist-researchers: how our bodies become implicated in the emotional and hydro-political flows we are researching and how caring-with rivers might confront the extractive logics of Global North academia. Attending to this double movement allows us to interrogate our position as activist-scholars: the opportunities opened by co-researching with river defenders, and the tensions of ‘translating’ situated practices into academic structures shaped by colonial hierarchies. In this sense, self-reflecting on our 'dislocated' positionalities we foreground the epistemic and political risks when methodologies like body-territory travel across geographies. By narrating our research journey as one of becoming-with caring rivers, we argue for a political ecology that remains grounded and attentive to the responsibilities that emerge when we move across epistemic and geographical territories.

Contribution short abstract

This study explores research as a relational and political practice, showing how positionality shapes decisions about benefits, narratives, and validity. It reflects on rethinking extractive practices and navigating ethical tensions within institutional structures for just knowledge creation.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution reflects upon research as a relational and political practice, drawing on lessons from collaborative work on socio-environmental issues in Latin America decolonizing knowledge creation. We are researchers from an international think tank focused on sustainable development, headquartered in Sweden but working from the Latin America regional office. In a region where colonial legacies remain, these histories shape us as researchers—our motivations, the questions we ask, and the decisions we make. Rather than treating positionality as a methodological add-on, we approach it as an embodied practice that actively shapes how research unfolds—who defines project goals and benefits, which narratives gain visibility, whose knowledge counts as valid, and how one navigates within institutional funding structures.

Through this lens, we explore an iterative and continuous process of transforming research practices, rethinking our academic backgrounds, which privilege technical expertise and extractive evidence standards, even with the best intentions. We discuss how shifting toward relational research requires rethinking our roles—from experts who lead to facilitators, companions and learners in shared processes of knowledge creation.

We also criticize narrative construction: who shapes the stories told about territories and the underlying assumptions they reinforce, and which worldviews are sidelined. Finally, we address ethical dilemmas in fundraising, including the strategic use of “Trojan horse” language to access donor agendas, noting both its usefulness and its risks of diluting transformative worldviews.

Overall, this contribution argues that positionality-in-practice is essential for resisting epistemic extractivism and fostering more just, reciprocal, and transformative research relationships.

Contribution short abstract

Direct access positions indigenous organizations as GEF fund recipients, exposing fundamental misalignments between global conservation logics and territorial governance practices. Examining positionality within this encounter in Madre de Dios, Peruvian Amazon.

Contribution long abstract

Political Ecology's decolonial turn increasingly centers indigenous territorial governance. Direct access to environmental funds theoretically shifts power by positioning indigenous organizations as direct recipients, yet implementation reveals deeper incommensurabilities between global conservation frameworks and territorial realities. This contribution reflects on positionality while coordinating GEF financing within an indigenous Amazonian federation in Madre de Dios, Peruvian Amazon, examining how this structural encounter shapes what becomes possible in conservation practice.

GEF frameworks operate through predetermined indicators, results-based management, and donor accountability logics measuring hectares, outputs, and quantifiable deliverables. Indigenous federations—born from centuries of territorial struggle—enact governance through political articulation across nations, territorial surveillance against extractive industries, intercultural education, ecosystem services provision, and forest defense as lived practice. These contributions exist but remain largely invisible to indicator systems designed within different epistemological frameworks.

Direct access doesn't resolve this misalignment—it relocates where the encounter happens. Indigenous organizations must now navigate institutional precarity, limited technical capacity, and internal power dynamics while simultaneously translating territorial governance into audit-legible documentation. Working within rather than observing these processes exposes how federations strategically reconfigure global resources toward territorial autonomy while confronting frameworks that cannot recognize their substantive forest governance contributions.

Does direct access enable territorial projects or simply shift where colonial validation structures operate? How does positionality within indigenous organizations—rather than studying them—reshape understanding of these encounters? Can global conservation finance and territorial governance logics genuinely articulate, or does "decolonial practice" obscure persistent incommensurability?

Contribution short abstract

I offer 7 lessons on positionality and decoloniality in political ecology, as a Western teacher, curator at the Journal of Political Ecology, and supporter of research and students over 3 decades. Practicing PE involves ethical commitment, not just research inputs and outputs.

Contribution long abstract

Decolonised storytelling in political ecology (PE) means learning from personal biographies. My 'positionality' as a relatively privileged British PE with a stable job, even one committed to engaged scholarship [https://nordia.journal.fi/article/view/79938], may seem irrelevant. But insights of more general interest include 1. Passions and bad life experiences can guide material actions and scholarly contributions. 2. PE is radical but it takes different forms, informed by conjunctures (Clark University, and postcolonial Burkina Faso for me). 3. Scholars can actually engage with policy and international development, while maintaining integrity. 4. Refusing academic norms in universities is vital (especially scholar arrogance, 'large grant capture' focus, avoiding teaching, and attacks on critical programs). 5. Publication is an Achilles heel of PE. Capitalist firms don't deserve our support, or our articles. 6. Supporting rights and justice is pluriversal and vital (for me supporting students, Kanak peoples in New Caledonia, environment, and local refugees & asylum seekers). 7. Life stages, and health, alter PE commitments and contributions significantly. PE has transgressed Western origins, and Western practitioner stories like mine will lose their importance. But personal responsibility includes acts of curation (now 950 articles edited for the JPE), prioritizing the work of others, and teaching, among a multitude of contributions and career options. Most importantly, while doing PE we should all hold authority and corporate actors to account, in/outside universities, and promote good values and behaviour. I conclude with observations on embodied values in current work with refugees and asylum seekers which is practical, and sometimes scholarly.

Contribution short abstract

Diasporic methodologies are an invitation to take seriously one’s capacity for commitment and multi-territorial belonging, and to critically engage with positionality. These questions are crucial in resisting the extractivist logic of academia and instead embracing relationality and reciprocity.

Contribution long abstract

A question which emerged as the fundamental ethical and political consideration surrounding my research on resistance to lithium mining in Serbia is: How to conduct research on extractivism without reproducing the extractivist logic of academia?

While critical and decolonial approaches have sought to challenge the "objective" distance as a Western and colonial mode of knowledge production, it remains dominant even in works that recognise the extractivism of research. Methodologies that orient themselves away from extractivism, on the other hand, require deep embeddedness, rootedness and community building, as well as serious engagement with one's positionality.

I describe my personal position as coming “originally” from Serbia, but being born and raised in the Czech Republic and receiving the privilege of an EU passport. For my PhD research that I am currently finishing, I "returned" to Serbia to focus on resistance to lithium mining and green extractivism more broadly. Serbia occupies a specifically liminal position of being in Europe, but not in the EU, often described as a European periphery and sometimes considered a Global South country according to some economic metrics.

I highlight my diasporic identity as capturing some of the tensions between an insider and an outsider, and “home” and the “field." I suggest that the notion of a diaspora offers a way to think through some of the tensions between rootedness, embeddedness, distance and estrangement in research. These insights are relevant for all the researchers who "return" and who navigate the privileges and issues between different places which they occupy.

Contribution short abstract

Exploro cómo la posicionalidad y el privilegio influyen en la investigación en Ecología Política, desde territorios rurales andaluces y proyectos con comunidades nativas, y cómo evitar el extractivismo académico mediante prácticas decoloniales.

Contribution long abstract

Mi propuesta aborda cómo la posicionalidad, el privilegio y el extractivismo académico moldean la práctica de la Ecología Política desde experiencias situadas en el mundo rural andaluz y en proyectos con comunidades nativas en Ecuador. Como biólogue trans, neurodivergente y originarie de un pequeño pueblo de Cádiz, y como cofundadore de un centro de rescate de fauna cogestionado por mujeres y disidencias rurales en Sevilla, trabajo en territorios atravesados por dinámicas extractivas —mineras, científicas y epistémicas— que revelan continuidades coloniales tanto en el Sur Global como en el Sur rural europeo.

He observado cómo saberes locales son frecuentemente apropiados por instituciones académicas para producir publicaciones, proyectos y patentes sin retorno comunitario. Este extractivismo académico afecta, de maneras y en niveles notoriamente diferentes, a pueblos indígenas de territorios atravesados por la colonización y a comunidades rurales en contextos europeos, mostrando que la colonialidad del saber opera a múltiples escalas. Desde mi posición híbrida —entre vulnerabilidad y privilegio— he buscado facilitar la participación de sabedoras locales e investigadoras indígenas en espacios internacionales, enfrentando el reto de abrir puertas sin reproducir desigualdades.

Propongo reflexionar colectivamente sobre el papel que deben desempeñar quienes ocupan posiciones de privilegio, incluidas científicas europeas, en la creación de prácticas de investigación que no repliquen lógicas coloniales. Exploro la posicionalidad como una herramienta crítica para redistribuir poder, fortalecer la justicia epistémica y transformar la manera en que producimos conocimiento en EP.

Contribution short abstract

Reflecting on post-wildfire research on unceded Nlaka’pamux territory, this paper shows how participant-led, trauma-informed heuristic phenomenology turns positionality into a methodological engine while exposing limits of decolonial aspirations in political ecology.

Contribution long abstract

This paper reflects on doing political ecology as a non-Indigenous, migrant researcher working on unceded Nlaka’pamux territory after the 2021 Lytton Creek Fire in British Columbia, Canada, and asks how heuristic, phenomenological and trauma-informed methods can operationalize positionality in a study that is informed by, but does not claim to be, decolonial. Drawing on the author’s doctoral project Charred Chronicles, the paper outlines a research design that combines participant-led walking interviews, photo-elicitation and conceptual mapping with in-depth reflective sessions in which residents choose where to walk, what to photograph and how to narrate altered home landscapes. These multimodal encounters are structured through trauma-informed protocols and ongoing consent, redistributing control over what counts as data and when to pause, withhold or withdraw. Heuristic inquiry requires the researcher to weave their own history of disaster, migration and homesickness into the analytic process rather than treat “field” and “researcher” as separate, surfacing tensions between institutional ethics, Indigenous data governance and community expectations of care. The presentation analyses two fieldwork vignettes, a participant-led drive through the burn scar and the co-creation and later withdrawal of a photo narrative, to show how consent, silence and representation are negotiated and how epistemic authority is continually repositioned. The paper argues that participant-controlled, trauma-informed heuristic inquiry turns positionality into the central methodological engine of the project, while simultaneously revealing the limits of decolonial aspirations within Global North research infrastructures, and proposes this ambivalence as a productive starting point for re-politicizing place-based political ecology.

Contribution short abstract

This ethnographic research examines how journalists and indigenous sources embody the affects of reporting land conflict. Set in Indonesia's food estate megaproject in South Papua, this research unpacks humanising narratives of citizen solidarity in the face of state-sponsored violence and ecocide.

Contribution long abstract

In the name of "food sovereignty," Indonesia is clearing 2,000,000 hectares of South Papuan forests for rice and sugar monocultures. Deploying the military to oversee massive land grabs, this food estate megaproject is displacing tens of thousands of indigenous Papuans, causing irreversible damage to biodiverse ecosystems that are vital to Earth’s climate stability.

In a Jakarta-centric media landscape predominantly owned by politically powerful conglomerates, Indonesian journalists encounter challenges in getting investigative reports funded and platformed—often risking their careers and personal safety for voicing solidarity for Papua. Meanwhile, indigenous communities displaced by the food estate lose their living spaces, livelihoods and societal stability at gunpoint: it is a manifestation of a violent, ecocidal state-sponsored land grabbing playbook that no Indonesians are safe from, and Papuans are extra vulnerable to due to racial and political factors. There is a current gap of academic scholarship on the affects of reporting intergenerationally traumatic land grabs, both on the journalists’ side, as well as the side of the sources experiencing it.

My research aims to explore the personal and collective political impacts of humanising journalistic narratives about agrarian conflict through the eyes of the indigenous Papuans experiencing it and the Indonesian journalists reporting it. Inspired by affective research methodologies, action research and eco-feminist ethnography, I aim to expand the current scholarship of Indonesian media and Papuan self-determination by amplifying my participants’ empirical knowledge of the field’s lived realities. I plan to use qualitative methods, including semi-structured in-depth interviews, participatory observation, and content analysis.

Contribution short abstract

This work explores how positionality evolves in transdisciplinary research through the River Co-learning Arenas framework. Drawing on river cases in Latin America and Europe, it shows how researchers navigate fluid roles, relational encounters, and ongoing reflexivity in multi-actor collaborations.

Contribution long abstract

This presentation reflects on the evolving and situated positionalities that emerge when engaging in transdisciplinary river research through the framework of River Co-learning Arenas (RCAs). RCAs can be defined as a space for co-creation of actionable knowledge between activist researchers and grassroots social movements. While RCAs was conceived as a pathway to revitalize relationships between rivers, people, and more-than-human communities, its practice, continually reveals how positionality is constitutively shaped through the encounters it sustains.

Drawing from experiences in RCAs in Latin America and Europe, I examine how positionality is not a static declaration of identity or standpoint in these spaces, but a fluid, relational, and negotiated practice that changes through encounters between the multiple actors involved in RCAs. These engagements often unsettle the researcher’s assumptions, motivations, and attachments, calling for forms of continuous—or relational—reflexivity that exceed anticipatory models of positionality declared at the outset of a project. Instead, RCAs demonstrate how new subjectivities and understandings emerge through conflict, dialogical processes, and exposure to plural ontologies and ways of knowing.

The presentation discusses the methodological and ethical challenges that arise when the researcher acts simultaneously as facilitator, catalyst, translator, and political actor within RCAs. These roles involve forging connections across scales, navigating the challenges of holding space for marginalized imaginaries, and engaging with decolonial and embodied methodologies that integrate sensing, feeling, and thinking. They also require acknowledging the limits of reflexivity itself, recognizing that full transparency is impossible and that power circulates in ways that are never fully graspable.

Contribution short abstract

Práctica de investigación-acción situada en la periferia sur de Lima que, desde la memoria ancestral y la ecología política, impulsa la revitalización comunitaria y la recuperación del río Lurín, articulando saberes vivos y estudio crítico frente a desigualdades socioambientales.

Contribution long abstract

Mi práctica por la justicia socioambiental nace en la investigación-acción, un quehacer creativo+crítico desde y con el territorio. Esta práctica se ha tejido en comunidades urbanas de la periferia sur de Lima, donde la memoria ancestral —personal y colectiva— se reactiva al reconectarme con centros ceremoniales andinos/preandinos, así como con ecosistemas frágiles como las Lomas de Lúcumo y la cuenca del río Lurín. Estos cuerpos-territorios, nutren mi comprensión de la ecología política como un horizonte que revela cómo la regeneración de la vida re-acciona a presiones urbanas y extractivas en la cotidianidad.

Desde mi posicionalidad —como persona disidente de género y de origen andino, migrante temprana del Cusco a Lima— reconozco que la educación moderno-colonial dejó marcas de desarraigo y silenciamiento. La ecología política ofrece un lenguaje para leer estas experiencias como parte de procesos que reducen la tierra, agua y semillas a mercancía, desatendiendo la crianza mutua de la vida.

Desde esta vivencias, mi investigación transita hacia la revitalización comunitaria/ayllu, para la recuperación del río Lurín en la cuenca baja, un territorio que evidencia pérdida de manantiales, contaminación y desigual acceso al agua. Desde la mirada de la ecología política, estas problemáticas revelan trayectorias de poder, omisiones institucionales y jerarquizaciones urbanas que marginan territorios periféricos. Frente a ello, hacemos educación comunitaria dentro del río, creando un espacio antagónico a las lógicas dominantes, donde saberes vivos dialogan con el estudio crítico. Así se afirma una ecología política situada, encarnada y comprometida con la defensa de la vida y del territorio.

Contribution short abstract

Dans quelle mesure une sociologie décoloniale de l'environnement rend-elle indispensable un exercice de positionnalité, comme étape première pour fonder des savoirs justes, pluriversels et une théorie restauratrice d'écologie politique?

Contribution long abstract

Ancrée dans le contexte postcolonial de La Réunion, ma contribution mobilise la perspective des colonisé·es pour analyser la persistance de la colonialité du pouvoir et des savoirs. En tant que sociologue autochtone, je décris dans mon manuscrit d’HDR (Thiann-Bo Morel, 2025) comment la recherche universitaire française reproduit les injustices épistémiques (Fricker, 2007) en valorisant certaines approches scientifiques et en "cafardisant" (Ouassak, 2023) d'autres modes de connaissance. Il s'agit d'une réponse directe à l'appel de Linda Tuhiwai Smith à déconstruire le lien inextricable entre recherche et colonialisme (Smith, 2021), selon une « épistémologie du point de vue » qui vise à une décolonisation épistémique radicale (Grosfoguel, 2010), s'opposant à l'extractivisme scientifique et à la reproduction de clichés racistes et classistes dans l'analyse des luttes environnementales.

Raconter nos propres histoires implique de « désobéir aux paradigmes » (Mignolo, 2011). Pour relever ces défis, je propose de mettre en perspective un exercice de positionnalité (Thiann-Bo Morel, 2025) avec une analyse située d'une infrapolitique des groupes subalternes (Scott, 2006). A travers l’examen de la façon dont l’autochtonie est mobilisée comme catégorie politique et raciale (Pulido, 2018) dans les luttes environnementales, je prends au sérieux les émotions - comme carburant d'intelligibilité - pour évoquer la complexité des rapports de race, de genre et de classe qui façonnent la recherche et l'activisme. En faisant de la positionnalité un outil politique j'aimerais inviter redonner à la théorie son pouvoir de guérison (hooks, 2014) pour mettre en œuvre une justice restauratrice des savoirs et des territoires.