✍️ Gaia Giuliani and Farah Polato are editing a special issue of the journal From the European South. The theme is ‘On Catastrophe: Visual Reflections and Practices’.
📅 Proposals for articles/essays/visual essays/conversations must be submitted by 15 April.
👉 https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/en/call-fromeuropeansouth-2026/
#Histodons #Arts #CFP #Cinema #PoliticalEcology #EnvHist #PoliticalPhilosophy #CulturalStudies #GenderStudies #QueerStudies #CriticalRaceStudies
Might as well do an #introduction post as it has been a while...
Hello there Fediverse! I am an environmental archaeologist interested in how past communities interacted with and shaped their environments (and vice versa). Just finished my #PhD (Physical #Geography at #Plymouth) focusing on the #HumberheadLevels. For my thesis, I combined #pollen analysis, #GIS, and #geoarchaeology to understand relationships between people and #wetland #landscapes. I recently passed my viva, so I am currently looking for work.
My published work thus far includes contributions on land cover reconstruction in complex wetland systems and chapters on #anarchist approaches to #archaeology and #heritage practice. I have a few more pieces in the works, and little time to do them all.
As far as research goes, I have been mostly interested in challenging the 'pristine #nature vs human impact' binary, the politics of how we interpret past landscapes, and unpicking what we actually mean when we talk about 'natural' environments and the messy reality of human-environment coevolution.
Reviving this account to catch up with your lovely faces and to see what's happening in #archaeology #paleoecology #gis #wetlands #politicalecology and related fields. 💗
OnlineFirst - "Eyes on the shoreline: The disciplinary power of the ecological gaze in marine waste governance" by Jie Zhuo and Jingzhou Liu:
#MarineWaste #PlasticPollution #MarineGovernance #EnvironmentalGovernance #PoliticalEcology #HumanGeography #EnvironmentalSociology #WasteGovernance #OceanConservation #CoastalCommunities #ChinaStudies
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/25148486261417105
Just published: "Smart adaptation or data colonialism? Interrogating the role of digital technologies in climate adaptation", with @ggioli
#openaccess
https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486251409982 in @envplane
The paper explores how #ClimateServices shape #ClimateAdaptation through depoliticization, financialization, and experimentation — builds on research with https://www.digitalclimatefutures.org.uk funded by Leverhulme Trust
Mussolini's Nature is now available also in Spanish, sporting the best cover of all the editions
OnlineFirst - "Smart adaptation or data colonialism? Interrogating the role of digital technologies in climate adaptation" by @ggioli and @GioBettini:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/25148486251409982
#ClimateAdaptation
#PoliticalEcology
#ClimateJustice
#DataColonialism
#DigitalGeographies
#ClimateServices
#SmartAdaptation
Ecology is a governance issue. 🌱
When I translate territorial disputes for Mongabay, I don't just translate the 'nature' words. I translate the legal mechanisms of enclosure.
From Rapa Nui to Peru, the fight for the land is a fight for legal definition. We need to audit the laws of conservation as strictly as the laws of finance.
Saha, S., (2026) “Endangered cobras and conservation politics: Exploring multispecies encounters in agrarian landscapes of West Bengal”, Journal of Political Ecology 33(1): 6439. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.6439
This article challenges dominant conservation discourses that frame nature as pristine and separate from humans, critiquing the wilderness paradigm informing Third World environmental planning. While scientific discourses promote holistic planetary visions, they overlook how environmental politics is entangled with human cultural practices and identities. Drawing on ethnographic research in Musharu, a village in East Bardhaman, West Bengal, India, the article locates the role of culture in shaping environmental struggles and identity politics rooted in Third World ecological concerns. Musharu is known for its unique coexistence with poisonous cobras, revered as manifestations of the village deity. This multispecies relationship is increasingly threatened by recent monsoonal irregularities disrupting snake habitats. This climate vulnerability creates discrepancies among national environmental bodies, local conservationists, and village inhabitants with conflicting narratives about their non-human neighbors. Conservationists advocate scientific protection of these snakes through formal protection and spatial segregation, while inhabitants who see them as protective figures reject such interventionist techniques. For them, conservation premised on the idea of wilderness as an autonomous domain devoid of human involvement impinges on their ways of organic relatedness with these divine snakes. The article concludes that viewing human living as distinct from wildlife conservation may lead to misrecognition of the environmental problem.
Landherr, A., (2025) “(Non-)Knowledge, slow violence and latent conflicts over mine tailings in the Chilean Atacama region”, Journal of Political Ecology 32(1): 7106. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.7106
The "slow violence" arising from mining tailings in Chile spreads cumulatively, slowly and invisibly over time and space. Even those affected are not necessarily aware of it. Toxic substances, which tailings contain in high concentrations, spread easily through water, soil and air, even entering the plants and the bodies of the surrounding population. In this way, they become part of food chains and entire ecosystems, threatening both livelihoods and local economies. This article is based on the conclusions of an empirical investigation of three communities affected by mining tailings in Chile (Pabellón, Tierra Amarilla and Chañaral), conducted between 2014 and 2022, where not only is the severity of the consequences of cumulative exposure in the medium and long term made evident, but also its combination with other socio-ecological and economic inequalities. Material invisibility accompanies the social invisibility of those affected. The focus is the generation of knowledge and ignorance as a principal factor that hinders or facilitates the perception of risk in the face of environmental slow violence, determining the environmental (in-)action of the actors involved and the possibility of resistance by those affected.
Castillo, C., (2025) “Environmentalities, subjectivities, and adaptation capacities in Costa Rican smallholder farms”, Journal of Political Ecology 32(1): 7082. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.7082
This article explores how different forms of adaptation governance in Costa Rica shape subjectivities and adaptation capacities in smallholder farms. The country presently has a neoliberal-welfare state structure that stems from the progressive transition of its welfare state to neoliberalism. Drawing on literature on environmentality and based on field work through three localities in Costa Rica, it is argued that the country's neoliberal-welfare state structure has resulted in some localities displaying an adaptation governance aligned with neoliberal environmentality, while others align with welfare environmentality. Based on in-depth interviews with farmers and their families, it discusses how the capacity of smallholder farms to adapt to climate change tends to vary, as each form of adaptation governance possesses a particular rationality and uses different technologies of governance, resulting in different framings of adaptation and available resources and services, such as financial aid for adaptation, climate change information, and training. Moreover, drawing on Feminist Political Ecology, the article analyses how these forms of governance seek to produce subjectivities and how farmers respond to these efforts through their engagement with adaptation. The article concludes that the lessons learned from these different scenarios can serve policymakers and political leaders in other similar development contexts to have a better sense of the direction their climate adaptation policies should take so they can promote climate justice.
IHC
Nika Shilobod
@envplane
Giovanni Bettini
Wilko Hardenberg
Shaun Murdock | Root & Branch
Journal of Political Ecology