Critical Ecology – a phrase I hadn’t encountered before, but what is it? While waiting for a selection of books to arrive, I discovered a video by Dr Paige West that would enlighten me further.
According to the spoken introduction, Dr West ‘traces the history of the theory and how it emerged from the study of isolated communities and their connections to external structures that impact their social lives. Dr West defines political ecology as a critical approach that sees environmental change as caused by both natural and human structures with differential impacts for individuals within those structures. Dr West highlights the role that female academics have played in advancing the theory and methods of political ecology and then focuses on the influence and ideas from Foucault including discourse, power, and discipline. Dr West then draws from examples of her own work in Papua New Guinea to exemplify the ongoing use of the political ecology frame starting with characterising contemporary communities connected to the outside world and continuing to explore copy commodity chains as one form of local global relationships. Dr West ends by discussing updated understandings of Marx’s ideas of accumulation and dispossession and suggests that there are both material and non-material forms of these tendencies in modern global economic structures.’
I’ve made some notes so far for reference and will be revisiting this video to make further ones.
In the video, Dr West highlights a selection of academics writing on the following aspects of Political Ecology:
- Post Structuralist Political Ecology
- Arturo Escobar
- Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
- Feminist Political Ecology
- Dianne Roucheleau
- Barbara Thomas-Slayter
- Esther Wangari
- Kim Tallbear
- Place-Based Political Ecology
- Aletta Biersack
- Reads the above then says ‘this is really interesting, but there’s this new work on the importance of place in anthropology coming out of the 1990s’ and she says people’s attachment to place is one of the most important things in people’s lives; how is people’s socio-cultural attachment and an understanding of place being altered by these kinds of multi-scale-ular interactions? So very specifically, how does someone thinking about a particular place as ‘sacred’ or ‘not-sacred’, how is that affected by these multiple scales of influence?
- Aletta Biersack
- Ethnographic Political Ecology
- Paige West
- Molly Doane
- Nicole Peterson
The one that jumped at me initially was Biersack’s Place-Based Political Ecology and the relevance of people’s attachment to place. Could this be connected to how I feel about Bushy Park and my relationship with this particular ‘place’?
References:
West, P. 2020. An Introduction to Critical Ecology [online] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAWfggb1ezw> [Accessed 16 October 2020].
Jennie Meadows MA Photography 