June 2018 – Paige West

On June 20th, 2018, I was honored to give one of the keynote addresses at the 2018 POLLEN conference in Oslo, Norway. The talk I gave, “Critical Approaches to Dispossession in the Melanesian Pacific: Conservation, Voice, and Collaboration” was a co-authored piece I wrote with my long-time research partner John Aini. In it I drew out three interrelated themes that, if we think about together, we can use to make Political Ecology a stronger, more equitable, and potentially decolonial field. One of those themes had to do with the gendered nature of the genealogies of knowledge we draw on and reproduce in the field. Here is what I said about this in the keynote address:

“I want us to think about the genealogies of knowledge that we produce and replicate in Political Ecology and while I love you all and I love this field, we are a field that valorizes and draws on the scholarship of white male scholars over that of other kinds of scholars and that draws on European philosophical traditions to the exclusion of other philosophical traditions. Additionally, across the field, men are cited as making theoretical contributions and pushing the field forward while women are characterized as producing “case studies” that show the effects that are theorized and analyzed by their male colleagues. These practices make our field less robust than it could and should be.”

“So here is my second conceptual thread – I ask, how do we as a field value and produce knowledge through our reading, citing, AND teaching of some scholars and not others? Who do we give primacy in our construction of the genealogy of the field and why? What are the politics of relegating women’s scholarship to the realm of the case study? Why do, predominantly, white male scholars become the theoretical stars of the field? And what does this foreclose? What kinds of epistemic advances don’t happen because we fail to expand our ideas of whose work matters and what kinds of work count as theory and what kinds don’t?”

During the Q and A period someone asked me to provide a list of women who I read who I think are key to the field of Political Ecology. Here is that list, with some additions by a few of my friends. Please note: I know that this is super North American focused and I know this is a limitation on my scholarly practice, so send me names, I will add them. Lets make a robust list that spans the planet.

Amber Huff https://www.ids.ac.uk/people/amber-huff/

Judith Verweijen https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/politics/people/academic-staff/judith-verweijen

Andrea Brock https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p322495-andrea-brock

Farhana Sultana: https://www.farhanasultana.com

Sian Sullivan: https://www.bathspa.ac.uk/our-people/sian-sullivan/

Diane Rouchelau: https://bit.ly/2M7fqyS

Molly Doane: https://bit.ly/2MaVn2z

Nicole Peterson: https://bit.ly/2K612qd

Nancy Peluso: https://bit.ly/2M8ZWdH

Bonnie McCay: https://bit.ly/2yrS7xT

Amelia Moore: https://bit.ly/2McEGUG

Kristina Baines: http://kristinabaines.com/