Political Ecologies: Nature, Place, Heritage Archive (2016-2017)

The Working Group in Political Ecology will have its first meeting on August 30 Tuesday 2-3:30 pm at the Institute for the Humanities, Lower Level of Stevenson Hall. This will be an organizational meeting for the semester, and we will talk about possible grant applications and this academic year’s speaker/workshop program. Looking forward to seeing you at this meeting if you plan to participate in the working group this academic year.

September 27, 2016 at 2-4 PM

Political Ecologies Working Group

Planning meeting: HWW proposal

Tracey Heatherington, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee

Assisted Abundance: Viable Ontologies for a Climate Resilient Agriculture

World organizations such as the FAO have expressed urgent concerns about the challenges of climate change for the future of agriculture and global food security. Their narratives emphasize that climate stresses and instabilities may lead to increasing reproductive disruption of major commercial food crops. The reduction in biodiversity associated with the ongoing loss of heritage landraces in cultivation, and narrowing genetic profiles of staple cultivars, suggests a rising risk of declining yields, crop failures, and sterility or infertility of some principle varieties in the face of changing adaptive pressures. In response, seed bankers and crop scientists seek partnerships to conserve the genetic resources essential to breed fertile futures. They view the abundance of genetic materials stored safely in seed banks as a potent and reliable wellspring of climate resilience over the long term. If these resources are managed and shared as a global genetic commons, they argue, then new breakthroughs in climate change genomics and information management can be mobilized to assist the reproduction of agriculture. Yet “assisting abundance” for the hungry twenty-first century requires adapting the logics of plant breeding, intellectual property regimes, research infrastructures, institutional collaborations, and formation of expertise to address emerging concerns. New ethical orientations and transcultural sensitivities must be crafted to ensure viable futures. This paper reflects on ethnography of initiatives associated with the Global Seed Vault and the Global Crop Diversity Trust, to explore the perspectives of moral entrepreneurs involved in the developing global network of seed banks and agricultural research facilities.

Ömür Harmanşah, UIC Art History

“Report From the Field: Lake-Places and the Politics of a Drying Landscape in Central Anatolia”

Sinan Erensü, Keyman Postdoctoral Fellow, Buffett Institute for Global Studies, Northwestern University

“Urgency / Emergency:

A Political Ecological Reading of Turkey’s Authoritarian Turn”

As the upsurge of the populist extreme right shakes the democracies of the world, Turkey and its ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) becomes source of interest as one of the earlier examples of the global authoritarian turn. What to make of the fall of the much-celebrated Turkish Model and its replacement with an authoritarian populism thus becomes a burning question. More often than not, however, Turkey’s authoritarian turn is explained merely on culturalist grounds; either through the democratic deficit embedded in its political cadres, or the popular desire for a strongman. Alternatively, this paper looks for an answer to this question by examining the environmental (justice) disputes across the Turkish Black Sea Coast over the last decade. Building upon ethnographic research on energy-related land-use conflicts, the paper connects the dots on a trajectory leading from a regime of urgency established around an infrastructure economy to a continuous emergency rule.

Sinan Erensü is a Keyman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Buffett Institute for Global Studies, Northwestern University. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Minnesota in 2016. His research and teaching interests include political ecology and political economy; urban and rural studies; and energy, infrastructures, and the politics of dispossession. Titled Fragile Energy: Power, Nature and Politics of Infrastructure in the “New Turkey”, his dissertation research explores the political work energy infrastructures do in 21st-century Turkey.

Organizational meeting.
Details to follow.

April 19, 2017 from 4 – 6 PM

Organizational meeting