Format/Structure

Panel with several presentations followed by a moderated discussion to foster dialogue between panelists and audience on shared themes and insights.

Long Abstract

Ethnobiology and political ecology are parallel currents flowing toward the same horizon: the urgent need to reimagine human-nature relations amid intensifying ecological and social crises. Political ecology foregrounds the political economy of environmental change and the uneven geographies of power that shape how people interact with the natural world. Ethnobiology, by contrast, investigates how communities understand, steward, and engage with their environments through culturally embedded systems of knowledge, language, and practice.

While distinct in focus and methodology, both fields share a deep commitment to exposing the structural roots of socio-environmental injustice and to imagining more equitable, plural, and sustainable futures. This panel brings them into deliberate conversation, inviting critical dialogue on what these two traditions can offer one another in theory, method, and praxis.

How can ethnobiology’s grounded, empirical accounts of human–environment relations enrich political ecology’s analysis of power, capital, and inequality? How might political ecology sharpen ethnobiology’s critique of the forces that erode cultural traditions, disrupt local knowledge systems, and displace people from their lands? And how can their intersection support more inclusive, decolonial, and future-oriented scholarship?

We welcome contributions that braid together ethnobiological and political ecological approaches, both from members of Indigenous, local, and racialized communities, and from those working in solidarity with them. This panel seeks to foster meaningful dialogue across perspectives and positionalities, bringing together diverse ways of knowing, being in, and relating to the world. More than an academic exchange, it is an invitation to explore how these fields can nourish transformative practice, build alliances, and help seed just, resilient and life-affirming futures.

This Panel has 8 pending paper proposals.
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