AAG Open Forum

AAG CFP: Emotional Political Ecologies

  • 1.  AAG CFP: Emotional Political Ecologies

    Posted 10-30-2015 23:42

    Apologies for x-postings. Please forward to anyone interested. We are looking for a couple more people to finalize the discussion panel, but if there is sufficient interest, then we will expand to two sessions.
    Please send in a short description of what you’d like to focus on or talk about, with your name, affiliation, and contact info to both the organizers by November 10, 2015: Dr. Farhana Sultana (sultanaf@syr.edu) and Marien González-Hidalgo (marien.gonzalezhidalgo@gmail.com).
    Thanks!

    2016 AAG Conference CFP

    Title: Emotional Political Ecologies

    Session Organisers:
    Farhana Sultana (Associate Professor of Geography, Syracuse University)
    Marien González-Hidalgo (Entitle PhD Fellow, University of Chile)

    Abstract:
    Emotions imbue environmental governance, resource use, and nature-society conflicts, but the relationship between emotions, power, and environmental change has only recently been systematically studied. Emotional political ecology is emerging as a field of study in geography and beyond, and this approach elucidates how emotions matter in nature–society relations, moving beyond rational resource users or managers to flesh out fuller and feeling subjects that complicate and enrich current understandings of nature-society relationships (Sultana 2015). Recent scholarship has brought together various strands of political ecology, emotional and affective geographies, feminist geography, and other theories into rich conversation that contribute to this emerging field (e.g. Sultana 2011; Nightingale 2011; Singh 2013; Morale and Harris 2014). This discussion panel aims to advance the study of emotions and affect within political ecology by fostering a debate about theoretical frameworks and action research agendas that can contribute to understanding everyday corporal and emotional experiences taking place in the course of environmental governance and/or conflict. We aim to elaborate and expand the role of emotions in the triad power-knowledge-subjectivities, and advance how the consideration of emotions can support both the action and research of environmental change.
    Some questions we will consider, but are not limited to, are the following:
    * What does the study of emotions add in helping us understand environmental change and conflicts?
    * What is the role of emotions and “the affective” in relationships between power, knowledge and subjectivities?
    * How do affective and emotional processes facilitate governmentality and subject-making, commoning, and resistance?
    * How can we develop research in political ecology (particularly feminist and post-colonial/anti-colonial political ecology) that integrates further the embodied, emotional, and spiritual aspects of the production of socionatures?

    References cited:
    Morales, M., & Harris, L. 2014. “Using Subjectivity and Emotions to Reconsider Participatory Resource Management” World Development, 64: 703-712.
    Nightingale, A. 2011. “Beyond Design Principles: Subjectivity, Emotion, and the (Ir)Rational Commons” Society and Natural Resources, 24, 119-132.
    Singh, N. M., 2013. “The affective labor of growing forests and the becoming of environmental subjects: Rethinking environmentality in Odisha, India” Geoforum, 47: 189–198.
    Sultana, F., 2011. “Suffering for water, suffering from water: Emotional geographies of resource access, control and conflict” Geoforum, 42(2), 163–172.
    Sultana, F., 2015, "Emotional Political Ecology" In The International Handbook of Political Ecology, Raymond Bryant (Ed.), Edward Elgar Publishing, UK. Pp. 633-645.

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    Farhana Sultana, Ph.D.
    Associate Professor of Geography
    Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs
    144 Eggers Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, 13244, USA
    Email: sultanaf@syr.edu ; Website: http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/faculty/sultana.aspx
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