Format/Structure

Because of the panel topic we aim for diverse contribution types. The panel format depends on what we receive. Roundtable/workshop is most likely.

Long Abstract

The idea of the pluriverse, a world of many worlds, has become central to political ecology and decolonial thinking. It reflects the radical need to open up to the many ways of being, sensing, and acting that characterize both human and more-than-human lifeways. Nevertheless, political ecology remains dominated by representational modes and epistemologies rooted in Western traditions, most notably, the visual-centric logics of seeing, mapping, and categorizing. And while political ecology has long illuminated visible landscapes of power, grassroots struggles are also waged on the visceral terrains of taste, smell, sound, and touch.

By encouraging attention to the full sensorium, this panel aims to explore pathways to transcend the colonial legacies of ocularcentrism and optocentrism. We aim to move from the appreciation of diverse “worldviews” towards an integration of different “worldsenses” in political ecology. We contend that the perceptual is also political and seek to explore how multiple sensory experiences (e.g., combinations of touch, sound, taste, smell, visual, and non-visual embodied perceptions), can enrich, challenge, or transform the ways we engage with political ecology concerns, specifically regarding power, justice, environmental governance, and uneven development.

This panel seeks to develop and explore a multisensory political ecology to reconsider how knowledge, power and environments are produced, communicated, embodied, and contested. What stories of power, justice, and resistance emerge when we analyze environmental struggles not just through what is seen, but through what is tasted, smelled, heard, and touched? For instance, listening to landscapes, tasting food, feeling extractive infrastructures, or smelling toxicity may offer different ways of knowing and contesting environmental injustices.

This Panel has 11 pending paper proposals.
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