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- Convenors:
-
James Igoe
(University of Virginia)
Darren Ranco (University of Maine)
Rebecca Witter (Appalachian State University)
Tracey Heatherington (University of British Columbia)
Patrick Gallagher (University of Texas at San Antonio)
José Martinez-Reyes (University of Massachusetts Boston)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Monday 25 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Critical social scientists have done important work on the hegemony of parks -- the inequities they generate, mediate, and conceal. This panel speaks to mostly unrealized potential for bringing their critiques in conversation with other territories and ways of caring for more than human worlds.
Long Abstract:
Critical social scientists (especially Anthropologists and Geographers) have done important work on the hegemony of parks -- and the inequities they generate, mediate, and conceal. Related parks and people debates are accordingly a major theme in the conceptual framing of this conference. Paradoxically, however, these debates may actually strengthen the aforementioned hegemony by fixing on parks and people.
This panel considers the largely unrealized potential of putting these kinds of conservation critiques in conversation with other kinds of territories and ways of caring for more than human worlds. More precisely, it is concerned with ways in which Anthropology, and Conservation, can be brought into better relations with networks and movements for social and environmental justice, against racism and in support of indigenous sovereignty. Accordingly, it simultaneously concerns related initiatives for more than human community flourishing at diverse scales and locales. These possibiliities will necessarily be considered against the fraught contradictions of Anthropology colonial roots (a feature is shares with conservation and parks) and its leadership in grounded theory and collaborative research.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 25 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Decolonizing Land Trusts requires re-imagining the role of Land Trusts and building Tribal Nation infrastructures for former Land Trust lands. This paper looks at the example of both the decolonization of Land Trusts and ongoing attempts at Tribal Nation infrastructure across Wabanaki Lands.
Paper long abstract:
In 2018, a coalition of land trust organizations, later called First Light Learning Journey, answered a generations-old call by Wabanaki (Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, Abenaki, and Micmac) people and reached out to Wabanaki educators, land managers, governments, artisans, and activists to find areas of commonality related to access for Wabanaki cultural and natural resources and possibilities of land return in what is now known as Maine. This paper will examine the cultural, policy, and infrastructure challenges in this work, centering on the ongoing colonial legacies and desires in land trusts, their attempt at recognizing and reforming these legacies and desires, and Indigenous people's response to these organizations and their attempts at reform. The paper will chart a course from initial attempts by land trusts to realize and recognize they are on Indigenous lands, to the possibilities and concrete actions that lead to greater Indigenous access to their traditional homelands and land return.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I consider Sargassum as a non-human reclaimant on the Belizean coastal reserve zone, a weedy actor whose persistent arrival by sea disrupts racialized appropriations of the 66-foot coastal reserve zone, the so-called "Queen's Beach."
Paper long abstract:
The explosive growth of tourism in coastal Belize has led to a new era of dispossession by reclamation, in which coastal property is increasingly held by non-Belizean, often white landowners who often challenge the notion of the shoreline as a public reserve. Efforts to use the colonial common law concept of “Queens Beach” to assert public rights to the coast often face resistance and challenges, or outright hostile disregard by foreign property owners. As a result, the shoreline in crowded tourist zones like San Pedro town has become increasingly privatized, more difficult to access, and noticeably more white.
But an unexpected actor has recently reclaimed this Queens Beach—seaweed. Over the past several years, enormous clusters of Sargassum, a slimy brownish-green genus of seaweed (or macroalgae) has inundated beaches, prompting adjacent property owners to scramble to “clean” or “reclaim” the beach. There is an inescapably racial and colonial dynamic to the reclamation of beaches from the ravages of Sargassum: Primarily non-white (Creole, Mestizo, and Maya) Belizeans remove the brown seaweed so that the white sand beach can be more pleasantly consumed by primarily white non-Belizean tourists and expatriates. Yet these efforts at reclamation often fail, and in this failure, new opportunities for reclaiming the beach as a public, Belizean space have emerged.
In this paper, I consider Sargassum as a non-human reclaimant on the Belizean coastal reserve zone, a weedy actor whose persistent arrival by sea disrupts racialized appropriations of public, protected coastal spaces.
Paper short abstract:
A feminist engagement with relational ontologies and STS is useful to reconsider the gendered and cultural assumptions that remain embedded in emerging technologies and techniques of biodiversity conservation, such as genomics and big data.
Paper long abstract:
Discourses about climate emergency and extinctions excite passionate strategies to stem drastic ecological disruption, disintegration and loss. A keening for endangered or lost kinships with nature is matched by vigorous efforts to repair and rebuild relationships with non-human species. Many of these efforts are born from Western biological sciences and are tacitly shaped by cultural assumptions about the nature of gender, kinship and reproduction in the “modern” world. While political ecology’s focus on parks and protected areas has succeeded in helping to challenge colonizing conservation paradigms using Marxist approaches, it has been less attentive to aspects of conservation that are not contained within the analysis of property relations and access to material resources. Yet schemes for the care and protection of non-human species routinely instrumentalize and institutionalize the ideological basis of normative Euro-American kinship systems, with all their connections to the model of the entrepreneurial and sovereign nation-state. “Natural” visions of family-making and family management are affirmed by strategies for species conservation, at the same time that they naturalize the interventions we make to achieve ecological reproduction. Drawing on critical feminist approaches to embodiment, technology and kinship, this paper takes a tender look at techniques of biodiversity management that mobilize evolving technologies of conservation, from genomics to GIS.