The Political Ecology of Pandemics
Application deadline: 15 March 15, 2021|
Center for Development and the Environment (SUM), University of Oslo
The objective of this interdisciplinary PhD course is to critically approach the relationship between food production and food consumption and pandemics in an environmental perspective. This involves addressing issues like the links between global food and fodder production and the transformation of rural areas.
In this course, we will focus on how ecosystems and small-scale food production have changed to industrial and hyper-industrial scales; explore the aspirations of consumers in the West and in countries with emerging economies; address the ongoing changes in the global organization of labor, and focus on its environmental impacts.
The Covid-19 pandemic has made governments, health organizations and citizens in general painfully aware of the entanglement of changing patterns of food production and consumption and lethal pathogens. Problematizing evolving ideas regarding the relationship between food and pandemics, both communicable and non-communicable, can open new ways to understand global capitalism and its effects. Accordingly, pandemics are a highly relevant starting point to study the global political and economic systems related to the food industry. As food production, and particularly meat production, turns ever-more global, new relationships between humans, animals and, increasingly, pathogens evolve. The social, economic and environmental impact is high, and future sustainability depends on how these relationships are managed.
Against this backdrop the course will address questions such as:
What are the relations between the global food system and pandemics?
How can perspectives from political ecology and environmental humanities contribute to new ways of thinking about non-humans in the relationship between food production and pandemic entanglements?
How have local and national environmental histories shaped and been shaped by industrial systems for food production (and meat in particular), and what are the consequences for animal and human health, welfare and wellbeing at large?
How are food production systems organized in terms of labor and how do workers in industrial food production cope with pandemic outbreaks and their aftermaths?
SUM is organizing this course in cooperation with the Norwegian Researcher School in Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH) and the Norwegian Political Ecology Network (POLLEN-Norway).
For more information visit the course's webpage.
Political Ecology of Scarcity, Limits and Degrowth
Political Ecology of Scarcity, Limits and Degrowth
In 1972, the Club of Rome report ‘Limits to Growth’ triggered heated debates on the notion of environmental limits and their political implications. It claimed that dominant development pathways based on continued economic growth were leading to the scarcity of various environmental resources and to unsustainable resource use and pollution levels.
The report was instrumental in sparking the emergence of two versions of political ecology, but in different ways. In the Anglophone version it led to a critique of Malthusianism and its lack of social or class analysis when presenting environmental crisis scenarios, while in France the report inspired the emergence of discourses of décroissance (degrowth) and a radicalization of green politics under the banner of écologie politique.
These two political ecology traditions and their contrasting views on the issues of scarcity and limits were recently the point of departure for a Virtual Forum debate in the journal Political Geography. The discussionkicked off with a keynote by Paul Robbins at the Political Ecology (POLLEN) conference in Oslo in June 2018 and comments by Erik Gómez-Baggethun.
In his keynote paper, Robbins points out that (anglophone) political ecology scholarship often has deconstructed notions of limits and carrying capacities, and has made the case that these ideas tend to serve political and economic elites thereby reinforcing social injustices and marginalization. This political ecology tradition may be seen to stand in contrast to degrowth’s emphasis on planetary boundaries and ecological limits.
In his response, Gómez-Baggethun argues that the economy cannot continue to grow forever on a finite planet, pointing to the rising social and environmental costs of growth. ‘In today’s post-truth era’, he states, ‘banalizing research on ecological limits as mere narratives or social constructs pays service (albeit unintendedly) to the same elites and business powers against which such claims where initially conceived’.
This debate thus suggests a rift within political ecology between, on the one hand, those skeptical of narratives of environmental limits and scarcity, and, on the other hand, those committed to alternative sustainabilities based on these very concepts.
The aim of this PhD course is to follow up on this debate and to explore how political ecologists are engaging with, and aligning themselves with respect to each position (or perhaps staking out entirely new stances). We have invited scholars with different perspectives on technology, energy and the environment to help bring this debate forward amidst an increasingly urgent climate and environmental crisis.
The course is relevant for PhD students who are examining and trying to understand issues related to scarcity and limits. It will include lectures from leading scholars in the field who approach this theme from different perspectives. The course will also offer opportunities for participants to present, discuss and advance their own research and to interact and engage with scholars and students undertaking studies on related topics.
The Political Ecology of Scarcity, Limits and Boundaries
to be organised in mid 2021
Political Ecology Group, NMBU, led by Professor Tor A. Benjaminsen
In the POLLEN18 conference in Oslo, Professor Paul Robbins (University of Wisconsin-Madison) gave one of the keynote presentations on the issues of ‘degrowth’ and ‘scarcity’ and with Professor Erik Gómez-Baggethun from NMBU as a discussant. This created a lot of debate at the conference and subsequently in various fora. The two presentations have also been published in Political Geography (where Tor A. Benjaminsen from NMBU is one of the editors) – the articles are available here and here. The proposed PhD course will dig more into this debate addressing issues such as ‘limits to growth’, ‘planetary boundaries’, ‘ecomodernism’ and ‘degrowth’. We will among other issues investigate what scale means for questions of limits and boundaries. The discussion will also imply an investigation into critical realism and where the limits of social construction lie. While the debate about the natural limits for human society is old, going back at least to Malthus and Marx, it is also a debate that is evolving with some recent developments following ongoing processes of global environmental and climate change.
The Political Ecology of Pandemics
to be organised in late 2021
Center for Development and the Environment (SUM), University of Oslo
led by Professor Mariel Aguilar Støen
The covid-19 pandemic offers a unique venue for interrogating various relationships connected to meat production and land-use change around the world. There has been a notable insistence in the media on the links between covid-19 and ecological ruin, in particular related to deforestation and habitat destruction. Much of this attention has dealt with the connection of the virus with wildlife. However, the commodification of wildlife for human consumption is only part of the picture; highly pathogenic novel influenza viruses occur more frequently in areas where industrial poultry and swine production take place.
The geographic distribution of areas where these viruses emerge is changing rapidly with the emergence of new geographical centres of industrial poultry and swine production. The efforts to contain the covid-19 pandemic have also revealed how reliant the meat industry is on temporary and migrant workers.
Using the covid-19 pandemic as a lens for exploring the political ecology of pandemics, this course will interrogate the following. First, how the corporate food regime has been conducive to the emergence of a multipolar meat production complex that is reshaping global geopolitics. Second, how the geographies of supply chains threaten fragile ecosystems across the world. Third, how these production systems mobilize and organize labour on the basis of distinctions such as class, gender and ethnicity. In all three aspects, the political ecology of pandemics concerns the agro-industrial remaking of the world in the image of the factory farm, which is highly destabilizing for existing social and ecological relations.
This course will build on the expertise and competence of members of two research groups at SUM: “Rural Transformations” and “Energy and Consumption”. Bringing together resources and overlapping interests for this intensive PhD course may enable SUM and POLLEN-Norway to establish itself within the emerging field of the political ecology of pandemics. Further, the course will allow for exploring synergies with yet a third research group at SUM, “Global Health Politics” doing research on the social and political dynamics shaping global health research and policy.
Political Ecology of Land and Food Systems
to be organised in 2022
Department of Geography, University of Bergen
led by Professor Ragnhild Overå
At least since Michael Watts’ (1983) Silent Violence: Food, Famine, and the Peasantry in Northern Nigeria and Piers Blaikie’s (1985) The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries, political ecologists have critically engaged questions of asymmetric power relations, inequalities, and injustices in the governance of various land and food systems. In short, these early thematic foci in political ecology have arguably never been more relevant. This is particularly evident in relation to increasingly urgent initiatives to address global challenges related to climatic change, biodiversity decline, and zoonotic-epidemiological crises, all of which remain inextricably entangled with the global political ecology of our contemporary agri-food regimes and systems. Accordingly, the objective of this PhD course is to foreground connections between past and present debates about the governance of land and food systems within political ecology and related fields. In doing so, the course aims to foster advances in the state of the art on these themes by supporting, enriching, and sharpening emerging research amongst an incipient ‘next generation’ of PhD candidates, Postdoctoral Fellows, and other early career academics interested in engaging political ecology as a field of study.
Political Ecologies of Education
to be organised in 2023
Section for Development Studies at Faculty of Education and International Studies, OsloMet
led by Professor Hanne Svarstad
What do children learn at school about environmental issues, and what would they learn if education were based on insights from political ecology? Coming generations of citizens will inevitably be confronted with serious environmental and climate challenges. We believe that they will be better prepared if they were offered education based on political ecology and with the building of skills in critical examination and discussion of environmental problems as well as broad ranges of various choices of action. The course will introduce the emerging field of political ecologies of education, which merges various aspects of political ecology with critical pedagogies in the tradition after Paulo Freire. The course will follow up one of the themes of the Greenmentality ‘toppforsk’ project funded by the Research Council of Norway that examines theories of governmentality (from Foucault) and hegemony (from Gramsci), and with a particular focus in this course on education. The course will be aimed at PhD students interested in political ecology at departments of, for instance, geography and development studies, as well as students at teachers’ education institutions. It will be organised by OsloMet’s research and teaching environment on development, education and alternative sustainabilities. This group hosted the POLLEN-18 conference at OsloMet and constitutes a vigorous part of the political ecology network in Oslo and Norway.
