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Paper short abstract:

This study examines the impact of oil exploration on sexual and reproductive health in Nigeria's Niger Delta. it unveils gendered power relations shaping planetary health, arguing for a feminist care-centered approach to address health challenges rooted in the ecology of extraction.

Paper long abstract:

While historical scholarship extensively documents the ecological consequences of industrial activities, a notable gap exists in understanding the effects on sexual and reproductive health. Scientific evidence links oil exploration to emissions of harmful substances such as carbon-dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and benzene, which pose serious threats to reproductive health, leading to birth defects, fertility issues, miscarriages, and high infant mortality rates. This study addresses the historical impact of industrial activities, specifically oil exploration, on sexual, reproductive, and infant health in Nigeria, focusing on the Oil-rich Niger Delta region.

This paper explores the transformative potential of feminist histories of care in addressing the planetary ill health challenges caused by oil exploration in the Niger Delta region. Drawing from historical analysis and utilizing archival, newspaper sources, medical reports, and ethnographic accounts, the study investigates the period from 1957, which marks the onset of oil exploration in Oloibri, to the establishment of the National Primary Healthcare Development Agency in Nigeria.

The paper unveils the gendered power relations that shape the environment, and planetary health using the sexual and maternal health status of women in the Niger Delta. It emphasizes the changes and continuities in the colonial and post-colonial histories of extractions. By examining the political-economic and social-cultural engagements between Niger-Deltan Women, state actors, and non-state actors. The study argues that planetary and reproductive health challenges in the region are rooted in the ecology of extraction, shedding light on the need for a Feminist care-centered approach in addressing the planetary ill health caused by industrial activities.

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Paper short abstract:

This communication deals with the common drift that affect people and plant beings in contexts of war, considering two artistic situations: Galb'Echaque by El Montassir in Southern Maroc, and the process when the remains of “Ténéré tree” were taken to the Boubou-Hama National Museum in Niger.

Paper long abstract:

“The attachment to an idea of a fixed landscape of Earth and humanity is the deepest mark of the Anthropocene” insists Krenak (2020). In various places, the experience of the catastrophe immobilized us in feelings of incomprehension of insurgencies of extreme inter-human violence. The awareness of the non-exclusivity of human beings on the planet walks amid successive fractures between the ecology of society and nature, pointing to the need for a critical refoundation of knowledge, both scientific and artistic. Cultural capitalism is moving towards the homogenization and destitution of politics in the arts, it participates in the aesthetic wars linked to imperialism and white racial hegemony (Nzegwu, 2003).

This communication deals with the capture and disconnection that affect people and plant beings in a common drift and the same destiny of impermanence, given the lasting effects of wars on those who lived them and those who did not experience them. I resort to two situations linked to historical-environmental in Sahara: 1) Artist Abdessamed El Montassir's reflection on traumas overshadowed by the dominant story in his work Galb'Echaque (2021), pointing to the need for an open aesthetic (Diagne, 2017). 2) The process that combines art, desertification, and human mobility when, in 1973, the remains of the “Ténéré tree”, a symbol of navigation in the desert, were brought to the Boubou-Hama National Museum in Niger.

The possibility of a non-human planetary future remains amid extractive strategies and academic indifference in the Capitalocene (Moore 2015, Demos 2017, Bourriaud 2021) driven by techno-optimism.

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Paper short abstract:

This study investigates the anthropocentric and other causative factors for the sudden collapse of Nigeria’s hitherto sublime health regime and the onset of serious health ailments unknown to Africans before now and seeks new ways of improving the connectivity between the environment and health.

Paper long abstract:

This study documents oral and written narratives that form a major part of Nigeria’s history, reality, and identity and analyses the connection and impact of the environment on the total health of her citizens. One such narrative shows how communities in Nigeria, a century ago, were known for the longevity of people’s lives and a high level of self-dependency, especially in the provision of food and healthcare. The lands yielded sufficient produce that served not only as food but as medicine to the inhabitants. There was little or no complexity in medical care as there was a cure for every ailment in the natural care largely dependent on herbal remedies, exercises, and organic foods, unpolluted and unsaturated ecological settings. Things fell apart as the invasion of African cultures by foreign lifestyles appears to have changed the paradigms of health status from the time of yore as told by our grannies. The change in everything and not just climate change cannot be overemphasized in African histories, especially contemporary narratives. The study therefore investigates the anthropocentric and other causative factors for the sudden collapse of Nigeria’s hitherto sublime health regime and the onset of serious health ailments unknown to Africans before now. The study relies on critical and comparative analysis of the histories to document the history of planetary ill-health and socio-cultural health practices that remain underrepresented in scholarship, and to establish new ways of improving the connectivity between the environment and the health or general well-being of Nigerian citizens.

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Paper short abstract:

In light of the global rise in antibiotic resistance, this paper examines the impact of antibiotics on livestock farming practices in Tanzania. It analyzes the discrepancy between the farmers’ extensive knowledge and their practical experience in relation to existing social and economic conditions.

Paper long abstract:

The use of antibiotics has had a significant impact on human medicine and food production. This success, however, is increasingly being undermined by the global rise of antibiotic resistance. Regulatory failures in the past have materialized as biological processes since the “history of antibiotics is not behind us, it is in us” (Landecker 2016: 44). In the field of global health, this embodied ill-health is often attributed to poorly informed choices, particularly by people in the so-called Global South. As such approaches neglect structural forces that prevent appropriate use, an analysis of related socio-material conditions becomes necessary.

This paper is based on an ongoing qualitative study of human-animal interactions in the context of current livestock farming in Tanga, Tanzania. The study is part of an interdisciplinary project that combines both anthropological and microbiological approaches to the research of antibiotic resistance. This paper examines how the adoption of antibiotics has changed farmers’ practices in navigating animal health. It aims to explore the diverse knowledge that the farmers hold about animals, antibiotics and resistance, and to analyze in how far they can translate this knowledge into practice. What knowledge is being suppressed due to structural conditions? What different drivers of antibiotic resistance do they identify? Building on farmers’ knowledge, it will also be investigated how alternative practices can be promoted to reduce antibiotic use. Such strategies, generated from and for the local context, could contribute to counteract North-South power dynamics.