Oral Presentation Institute of Australian Geographers & The New Zealand Geographical Society Conference 2014

Reimagining Political Ecology: Borrowing More-than-human Insights from the Rural Settlement Dynamics (14355)

Ashraful Alam 1
  1. Department of Environment & Geography, Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW, Australia

Traditional political ecology1 explains the interaction between environmental processes and class-based resource conflicts leading to land degradation from a broader political economy framework. However, contemporary resource conflicts are becoming increasingly complex – involving new technologies, global products, currency, actors and institutions as the rural places shift from their traditional production orientation to more consumption oriented practices. The paper explores this new material complexity, arguing, it is induced by the emerging agro-economic, post-agro-economic, rural development and climate-change dynamics, reducible neither to class based conflicts nor to those traditional modes of representation. The new form of struggles goes beyond the conventional land-centric primary production discourse and are amenable to more-than-human2 forms of analysis that have the potential to capture the increasing socio-natural3 complexity of the country-side. Drawing on more-than-human insights4 borrowed from the settlement dynamics of the villages in Bangladesh, this paper calls for reimagining political ecology to help explain the increasing flow and agency of things5, to recognise new subjectivities and struggles, and to provide new ways of addressing resource conflicts within the overwhelmingly hybridized global south.

  1. Blaikie, P. M., & Brookfield, H. (1987). Land degradation and society: Methuen.
  2. Whatmore, S. (2002). Hybrid geographies: Natures cultures spaces: Sage.
  3. Castree, N., & Braun, B. (2006). Constructing rural natures. In P. Cloke, T. Marsden & P. Mooney (Eds.), Handbook of Rural Studies (pp. 161-170). London: Sage Publications.
  4. Jones, O. (2006). Non-human rural studies. In P. Cloke, T. Marsden & P. Mooney (Eds.), Handbook of Rural Studies (pp. 185-200). London: Sage Publications.
  5. Bennett, J. (2009). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things: Duke University Press.