We are a collective of scholars and activists oriented towards a common horizon of emancipatory social and ecological transformation. With this platform, we aim to animate a space to share, debate and critically reflect on research and activist experiences, observations, methodologies, news, events, publications, art, music and other themes and objects related to political ecology.
A collective of scholars and activists
Our purpose
Rather than reproducing the mainstream policy/police system, we strive to conduct research and action that works with and for those whose voice is marginalised, sidelined or quashed by the dominant order. This can be unmasking corrupt elites and power relations, showing structural relations of inequality and proposing new ways of understanding and approaching “scientific” problems.
Our commitment
Through this path, we also seek to advance new research that contributes to a shift in what kind of approaches dominate in academia, that pushes towards greater integration of disciplines, and involves knowledge and insights from everyday experiences of oppression and resistance. By political ecology we understand the ways that the ‘environment’ as material and ideological category, is shaped by, and shapes, the political-economic structures and processes in our world, from the local to the global.
With this platform, we commit to:
- engage in reflections on political ecology outside the confines of universities and academic publishing houses, in the spirit of improving accessibility to this knowledge
- give space to stories that happen during research which usually escape from the “academic”, i.e. stories of us as researchers, activists, and of the people resisting;
- encourage more political ecology reflections on media (movies, books, fiction, novels, short stories, poems, comics, etc.), academic and non-academic; communicate issues in a more timely fashion and to a wider public than the academic publishing process would allow;
- offer approachable commentaries on what we study, what we learn and what we observe around us as political ecology researchers and activist-scholars, not tied to the confines of formal academic language;
- inspire and contribute to radical thought towards more egalitarian and ecological futures; encourage the growth of our network of engaged scholar-activists in political ecology at a transnational level.
How we started
We began working together under the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE), a EU-funded Initial Training Network. After the formal end of the project, we became an independent collective, establishing partnerships with transnational networks and other research and activist initiatives.