Introduction to Decolonial Political Ecology: Colonialism, the Environment and Resistances
Tutors: Felix Mantz and Ali Kassem
This course will run fortnightly on Mondays, 6pm to 8pm on Zoom (sign up to our learning platform, Ryver for Zoom link and course details)
Six weeks, 7th Feb – 18th April 2022
Suitable for beginners.
These 6 sessions are the continuation of the 6 sessions in the Autumn term.
We live in times of converging global crises, central to which are the escalating environmental and climate crises. From mass fires, droughts, floods, soil depletion and food systems failure, global warming, ocean pollution, and land grabbing for mega-projects such as dams, unsustainable agricultural schemes, or mineral extractivism, both “local” and “global” dimensions intersect to produce a state in need of urgent redress. Moreover, they unfold along racialized, gender, and class divides, with ecosystems and humans in the Global South being the most affected. This is no coincidence. The global ecological crises are the culmination of multiple planetary systems of power including, among many others, capitalism, sexism, Eurocentrism, racism and anthropocentrism. Moreover, they are historically and structurally rooted in European colonization, enslavement, and imperialism which contributed to the planetary proportions and perverse inequalities of the current crises.
This introductory course explores these crises and associated urgent topics within political ecology from a decolonial and Global South perspective. The course is structured into four parts. The first will offer a general overview on the relationship between colonialism, coloniality, and the environment. In the second part we examine the extent and depth of the myriad socio-ecological crises we are facing and ask how we should think about these. Zooming into these crises, in the third part we explore Global South insurgent movements that centre on land and food in particular to get a better understanding of how the coloniality of nature and resistance to it looks like on the ground. In the fourth and final part, we consider concrete solutions offered, contrasting so-called ‘false’ solutions from the top with grassroots proposals, Indigenous cosmologies and broadly decolonizing alternatives from below.
The aim of this course is to equip participants with a broad variety of theoretical and conceptual tools so they feel confident to make their own analyses of global socio-ecological events and movements around climate, land, food, and conservation from a critical decolonial lens.