Thread by @sergiocoronadod

Today! Last session on Theories & Concepts of #JPSWriteshop @Peasant_Journal with presentations on #PoliticalEcology #Gender and #CriticalAgrarianStudies from Amita Baviskar and @DzodziTsikata
Keep tuned on this exciting discussion with 75+ scholar-activists from 50+ countries

Amita Baviskar from .@IEGResearch will guide us through the ways in which Political Ecology speaks and challenge Agrarian Studies and what this brings to this conversation, regardless of the disciplinary fields!

The story begins in India, with the struggles of people against the construction of a dam in the Narmada Valley. Access and control on the means of production (rich farmers, indigenous people, extractivist state) shaped the conflict

The struggle brought up new notions: ecological values, the river as a place in a larger relationship with the land, and the question of culture. The land and the river were not only a means of subsistence: the land was sacred and the river is connected with their myth of origin

Traditional knowledge allowed people to constitute their social movement.

The struggle went beyond rights, towards a larger challenge to relations of production: people found this form of development as destructive of their forms of life.

The emergence of the ideas around ecological sustainable development, and challenged ideas of rural development, proletarianization, agrarian change, technologies, and the modes of production debate, brought by the green revolution.

The evolution of the debate on the peasantries in the 20th century highlighted that caste, religion, ethnicity are not secondary categories too class, in terms of understanding why people mobilize and act politically.

Still, The question for the role of ecology emerged later

Amita Baviskar: "The experience of the Chipko Movement in India, for the defense of their forest-based livelihoods, is one of the stories that synthesize these debates:

Women from the village protested by hugging the trees. The idea of the forest of being important, not only for ecological reasons but for the well being of the community was picked up for left-scholars for challenging the traditional analysis in the political economy.

Besides, these contemporary experiences of resistance brought back historical debates around the enclosure of the commons, like the one raised by E.P. Thompson with this analysis of the enclosure of the English commons:

doi.org/10.1080/030661… (Nancy Lee Peluso's review at JPS)

The dialogue between political ecology and political economy has also lead to blind spots

For instance, how feasible is the idea of considering energy and nature as a common and universal matrix, that can be considered and measurable in different ways.

Such a question brings back to the debate raised by Marx on the idea of natural limits of growth coined by Malthus and Ricardo. Marx pinpointed that rather than natural, there are social limits of growth, ruled by the private appropriation of socialized forms of production.

Another way in which political ecology challenges critical agrarian studies is by considering the flows between urban and rural spaces.

Rather than divisions, there are flows of energy, commodities, biomass, connecting through inequalities both spaces.

Amita Baviskar reminds us of the political ecology notion about the agency of nature!

The properties of nature are shaping social relations, they are not only the context, or the environment in which social relations are taking place, but most importantly they shape them.

Finally, while political ecology has reinforced the relevance of indigenous, racial, gender identities, is important that they come together through processes of collective mobilization, they are not given nor taken from granted, but transformed through the process of struggle.

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