Presentation short abstract

This presentation examines how Puerto Rican households and communities responded to food, energy, and water insecurity after Hurricane María, highlighting autogestión as residents filled state gaps and built resilience amid ongoing infrastructure failures.

Presentation long abstract

After a disaster, critical infrastructure systems—such as interconnected food, energy, and water (FEW) systems—face disruption, leaving households and communities vulnerable to resource insecurity. These disruptions not only exacerbate material scarcity but also lead to physical and psychological distress. When the state fails to respond, residents, community leaders, and grassroots organizations assume an important role in ensuring resource security. Drawing on 50 interviews with residents from urban and rural communities in Puerto Rico, this work analyzes household and community-level responses to food, energy, and water insecurity following Hurricane Maria (2017) and efforts to build community resilience eight years after this event. As the state abandons the ethics of social responsibility, this work employs political ecology to examine the culture of autogestión, or self-management, in Puerto Rico. By focusing on the factors that encourage autogestión at the household level, we also explore how these arrangements are positioned within broader socio-political discussions about the roles and responsibilities of the state in relation to critical infrastructure resilience and household FEW resources security.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation discusses how gender, livelihood, and ecology intersect in Mexico. As environmental degradation intensifies women's daily work and activism are essential to building sustainable coastal futures.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation examines the interesting dynamics of gender, fishing resources, and environmental justice in Northwestern Mexico through the experiences of women shrimp traders who have long sustained local economies and household livelihoods. Drawing on nearly two decades of ethnographic fieldwork in Southern Sinaloa, it traces how women’s work contributes directly to food security and the creation of local informal markets. Despite their central economic roles, gender norms and state policies have historically restricted women’s direct access to shrimp and excluded them from actively participating in the local fishing industry. In response, women shrimp traders mobilized diverse forms of collective action to secure resource access and reshape gendered power structures. Their efforts include protesting discriminatory regulations, organizing a labor union, and negotiating space on one of Mazatlán’s busiest street, achievements that culminated in the creation of one of the city’s oldest and most iconic seafood markets.

While these mobilizations initially emerged from economic need, accelerating environmental degradation--driven by climate change, pollution, and coastal development-- has transformed their struggle into one central to environmental justice. Women shrimp traders now confront declining catches and ecosystem uncertainty, linking their fight for livelihood security to broader efforts to protect coastal ecosystems. Through everyday resistance, organizational leadership, and community activism, these women illustrate how gendered practices of social reproduction are inseparable from ecological well-being. Their actions underscore the importance of incorporating feminist political ecology into discussions of resource governance and highlight women’s indispensable role in shaping more equitable and sustainable futures in Mexico’s coastal communities.

Presentation short abstract

In the past 50 years, Galicia (Spain) has replaced rural areas with eucalyptus. Plantation logics are transforming land to maximise profit for pulp production. Grassroots groups have organized to thwart and prevent the expansion.of eucalyptus plantations by uprooting them and restore native species.

Presentation long abstract

The Plantationocene, as a particular socio-ecological system that transforms people, more-than-human species, and landscapes unfolds in distinct ways in Galicia, Spain. It does so by plantation logics and transformations brought about by the introduction and expansion of Eucalyptus as extractivist industry for cellulose, but also as it turns into an invasive species with properties that makes forests vulnerable to fires. I will engage in human/more-than-human ethnographic fieldwork to elucidate the logics of the Galician Plantationocene and how people and trees subvert, challenge and put forth alternatives to understand transformed landscapes, relationships, and imaginaries.The first dimension of this research will focus on the emergence of grassroots groups and forest autonomous communities network called the “de-eucalyptization brigades” to thwart the expansion of eucalyptus plantations with the aim of restoring biodiverse Galician forests. I examine how they deploy cultural strategies of reviving cultural heritage traditions that promote ideas of Galician indigeneity. The second dimension of this research which is a more-than-human ethnographic account about how these practices entail changes in the way people relate to both invasive and native trees of the forest unraveling the ways people and plants co-constitute one another in ways to contest logics of the Galician Plantationocene.

Presentation short abstract

Esta ponencia analiza la canalización del Río Piedras como una disputa por el agua, el territorio y el poder en un contexto colonial. A partir de una investigación participativa con comunidades de la cuenca media, se interpreta el conflicto como una lucha por la justicia y la defensa de lo común.

Presentation long abstract

Esta ponencia examina el conflicto en torno a la canalización del Río Piedras en San Juan, Puerto Rico, como un proceso en el que chocan múltiples territorialidades y se disputan los significados del agua, el espacio y el poder en un contexto colonial. Los asuntos ambientales —y del agua en particular— en Puerto Rico están atravesados por dinámicas históricas de territorialización vinculadas al colonialismo, al neoliberalismo y a una visión heteropatriarcal del desarrollo y la gestión ambiental. No obstante, los marcos de territorio, justicia hídrica y ecología política han sido poco utilizados para analizar las luchas locales por el agua.

A partir de una investigación-acción participativa desarrollada entre 2021 y 2025 se integran entrevistas semi-estructuradas, observación participante y datos hidrológicos históricos para documentar las perspectivas de los residentes de la cuenca media del río. El gobierno de Puerto Rico, en sintonía con el Cuerpo de Ingenieros del Ejército de los Estados Unidos, presenta la canalización como la única alternativa para atender las inundaciones y proteger a cerca de 300,000 habitantes. Sin embargo, las comunidades perciben el proceso como injusto, impuesto y antidemocrático.

Este caso es particularmente significativo por tratarse del primero de cerca de ocho proyectos de canalización propuestos para distintos ríos del país, lo que implicaría transformaciones profundas en las relaciones entre el agua y la sociedad. La ponencia propone entender este conflicto como una lucha por la justicia del agua y la recuperación de lo común en Puerto Rico.

Presentation short abstract

This study examines how opponents and proponents of copper mining in Panama use Instagram to frame extraction (through the rhetoric of nature, nation, and economy) and mobilize networks (including NGOs, activists, and influencers as well as state and corporate actors) to disseminate their messages.

Presentation long abstract

In recent years, Panama has been locked in a protracted conflict over the country’s largest copper mine, which is operated by the Canadian company First Quantum Minerals (FQM). In 2023, environmental activists launched a campaign to protest a new concession to FQM, using social media to mobilize opposition and to frame the mine as a threat to Panama’s natural environment and national sovereignty. After massive street protests, Panama’s Supreme Court invalidated the concession, shuttering the mine indefinitely. However, FQM and its allies in the Mulino government have since fought back, launching a social media campaign of their own to frame the mine as “green” and as an engine of economic growth and job creation.

Drawing on a dataset of Instagram posts and metadata scraped from civil society, government, corporate, and influencer accounts, I first examine the rhetorical and affective strategies employed by pro-extraction and anti-extraction actors, focusing on how they uses framings around nature, economic growth, and national identity to mobilize (or demobilize) the Panamanian public. I then draw upon social network analysis to map out the interconnected webs through which proponents and opponents of the mine disseminate and amplify their messages. On the anti-mining side, I focus on connections among Panamanian NGOs, environmental influencers, and their external allies across Latin America and the Global North, while on the pro-mining side, I examine the networks that link state and corporate actors, playing particular attention to the role of pro-mining influencers (many of whom are FQM employees) in disseminating pro-extraction messages.

Presentation short abstract

Resistance in Kinnaur, articulated through the language of indigeneity, emerges as agrarian capitalism clashes with fast-moving extractivist hydroelectric dam projects, exposing the deepening contradictions of the dominant neoliberal growth paradigm.

Presentation long abstract

Hydropower expansion in neoliberal India exposes the deepening contradictions of the dominant growth-development paradigm. In Himalayan border regions like Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh, the state considers large dams as “green” infrastructures—asserting territorial sovereignty, delivering economic progress, and bolstering environmental legitimacy in the ‘Anthropocene’. Along the Sutlej River alone, more than fifty projects have been planned or operationalised via state-corporate collusion, rendering the region a frontier. These initiatives, however, have encountered sustained grassroots opposition; the vocabulary of resistance filigreed by the language of indigenous rights to land and livelihood.

Drawing on semi-structured interviews and secondary literature, the paper examines what contemporary mobilisation in Kinnaur reveals about the entanglement of identity, ecology, and political agency in India’s borderlands and its implications for environmental politics more broadly. It locates this resistance within long-term shifts, rooted in British colonialism and consolidated in the postcolonial period, from common-property agro-pastoral systems to private landholding and capitalist agriculture, which have produced an agrarian petty bourgeoisie whose aspirations and vulnerabilities shape contemporary contention. While ‘indigeneity’ is invoked, the struggle cannot be characterised as a classical case of environmentalism of the poor. Instead, resistance embodies a contradiction between agrarian capitalism and a fast-moving extractivist project—two economic-environmental regimes whose incompatible temporalities expose a crisis-ridden growth logic. By tapping into historical practises of commoning and associated relationships with nature, however, the movement attempts to actively reconstruct community consciousness beyond an essentialist identity politics. It challenges the state–corporate nexus in abject rejection and, in that, opens space for different ecological and political futures.

Presentation short abstract

Ethnography of transnational networks distributing Zapatista coffee from Chiapas shows how commodification reshapes land, labor, solidarity and ecological relations. The study examines how producers and activist circuits confront capitalist value regimes and craft resistant forms of economic life.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how agrifood commodification in southern Mexico is imbricated within broader dynamics of violent land dispossession, peoples’ displacements, and ecological degradation. Anchored in Marxian political ecology, it draws on ethnographic research of “rebel” coffee networks to interrogate how value is produced, extracted, and contested through labor and land relations, through choices over distribution and intermediaries, and forms of social reproduction. The empirical focus is a network of smallholder coffee producers in Chiapas and their allies from European social movements, whose transnational distribution channels challenge neoliberal commodity regimes.

The analysis reveals how capitalist agrifood frontiers rely on processes of abstraction, standardization, and enclosure to extract surplus value from land, labor, communities, and ecosystem conditions — often at the cost of ecological devastation and human life itself. At the same time, these networks generate alternative value regimes grounded in solidarities, ecological and community care, autonomous processes, and enduring resistance to commodification.

The paper investigates how value is materially and aesthetically constituted and politically contested in struggles over land and autonomy. By doing so, it highlights agrifood commodification as a form of dispossession and extractivism, comparable to mineral or resource frontiers. In a context of escalating polycrisis and violent dispossession, the paper argues that agrifood systems must be understood as critical terrain of capital accumulation as well as of racial and ecological violence. Recognizing these dynamics, it calls for political ecologies that center agrifood value-struggles as central to socio-environmental transformation and just futures.

Presentation short abstract

Grassroots ecological resistance in Türkiye challenges authoritarian extractivism and the dominant growth paradigm. Based on fieldwork, the paper shows how local communities build counter-hegemonic practices and alternatives amid intensifying political-ecological crises.

Presentation long abstract

In recent decades, authoritarian neoliberalism has increasingly operated through ecological exploitation, whereby extractivist projects become sites of dispossession, accumulation, and political control. This pattern is particularly visible in developing countries such as Türkiye, where large-scale mining, hydroelectric, and energy initiatives have reshaped not only local landscapes but also the modalities of ruling. In response, local communities have both recognized the multi-layered exploitation inherent in these projects and created counter-spaces through their own alternative organizational models. To contextualize this grassroots resistance, the paper situates these struggles within a Gramscian framework, examining how the hegemonic order seeks to secure consent and coercion over local communities, and how these communities respond with their own repertoires of action. State actors and corporate allies promise prosperity and employment while simultaneously cultivating fear through threats and the discourse that ‘the state cannot be resisted’. Pro-government civil society organizations and corporate-sponsored associations reinforce this hegemonic project by normalizing extractivist development. Against this backdrop, local communities have built village committees, neighborhood initiatives, and regional ecological platforms that enable knowledge exchange, the circulation of protest repertoires, and solidarity across different sites of struggle. These forms of organizing not only articulate opposition to ecological authoritarianism but also generate new political subjectivities and practices of participatory democracy under conditions of shrinking civic space. Drawing on original fieldwork and interviews, the paper argues that these grassroots formations not only resist ecological authoritarianism but also cultivate counter-hegemonic imaginaries that implicitly challenge the dominant economic-growth paradigm and the long-standing ‘catching-up development’ myth.