Format/Structure

Panel

Long Abstract

Wildfires are intensifying across the globe, igniting not only lands and homes but also long-burning questions about environmental governance, land relations, and the unequal distribution of risk and recovery. This panel explores wildfires through the lens of political ecology, situating it within broader frameworks of disaster, extractivism, and historical transformations.

We invite contributions that engage with wildfires as both material and symbolic forces—one that traverses ecological, social, and political terrains. We seek analyses that foreground wildfires´ human and non-human histories and structural drivers: from colonial land dispossession and fire suppression to fossil-fueled climate change and resource extraction. We also welcome accounts that consider fire as more-than-catastrophe—as a tool of care, a form of labour, or a site of cultural meaning.

This panel seeks to foster interdisciplinary dialogue that grounds wildfire in its wider political and ecological contexts. We pay special attention to the unequal impacts and forms of resistance shaped by intersecting identities and social positions, including race, class, gender, indigeneity, etc. We invite scholars, practitioners, and community researchers to help build a critical and situated understanding of what it means to live in an era of fire.

We welcome submissions across disciplines and formats, including:

Historical and archival research on fire regimes and land use

Field-based or ethnographic accounts of living with fire

Analyses of extractivism and infrastructure in shaping disasters

Indigenous and local fire knowledges and governance

The intersection of gender, race, age, and class in exposure to and response following wildfires

Labour conditions and sustainability in wildfire management and emergency response

Critical spatial and structural analyses of variables contributing to wildfires

The psychosocial dimensions of loss, fear, displacement and recovery in relation to wildfires, prior to, during and following the events.

Media, narrative, and the politics of communication in fire discourses

This Panel has 3 pending paper proposals.
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