Where’s the Love? Recentering Indigenous and Feminist Ethics of Care for Engaged Climate Research (original) (raw)
Related papers
Literary Geographies, 2018
Narratives of climate change place it alternately as an environmental justice issue, a national and global security issue, an apocalyptic threat to life on earth, an opportunity for social change, and more. In this article, I aim to bring critical geographic work on climate narratives into conversation with contemporary poetry, through close readings of specific poems. I argue that the work of contemporary poets, and in particular the work of Indigenous ecopoetics, is rich in poetic texts that offer imaginative practices for recalibrating climate change narratives. I look particularly to works by Craig Santos Perez, Kathy Jetn̄ il-Kijiner, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Joy Harjo, and Linda Hogan. I approach the poems as both a critical geographer and as a poet, thinking through and with their form and content in relation to climate narratives, and in relation to a description of Indigenous ecopoetics by Perez. I meet these poems as stored energy, as actors themselves in a human and more-than-human collective. A close reading of the craft of creative texts—particularly to the level of the line in poetry—highlights the inextricable connection between form and content in how a poem acts and means in the world. As a non-Indigenous reader of texts by Indigenous poets, my goal is not to perform a 'master' reading or analysis of these texts, but rather to learn from the poems and in doing so attempt to decolonize my own thought, a process that is a constant practice.
Environmental Communication, 2020
The paper discusses how anthropology contributes to climate change research and communication. Building on theoretical works that highlight the cultural framing of communication it investigates the signs and symbols that a Peruvian highland community creates and the imaginaries and identities it generates to interpret and communicate climate change and its environmental impact. To explore the community’s communicative repertoire the paper explores three climate voices that illuminate the conflicting ways the global discourse on climate change impacts the community’s future visions. Arguing that anthropogenic climate change poses a new challenge to the communication of urgent public issues the paper asks: Should the communication discuss climate change as a matter-of-fact issue? Or should it present climate change as a cultural phenomenon that is acknowledged as an issue in dispute? The paper concludes that climate change research is a post-normal science that not only must engage a range of scholarly traditions and methods but also listen to the voices that are affected by climate change in the real world. It encourages climate change communicators to recognize that climate communication is a dialogical relation based on the mutual interests of its experts and its users in providing as well as receiving knowledge.
Climate Resilient Development and Discourse in the Peruvian Highlands
2019
This dissertation strives to rethink apolitical and ahistorical efforts for adapting to climate change in terms of a political struggle for survival in times of radical global environmental change. Drawing on ethnographic and participatory fieldwork with agro-pastoralists of the Peruvian Andes, government officials and international NGO actors, this dissertation follows emergent climate-resilient discourse of rapid glacier retreat as it travels from global origins and articulates with local culture and indigenous ecologies in the Cordillera Blanca. Through this research, I offer a critical interpretive analysis of modern, capitalist and rationalist ways of knowing and planning for climate change, finding that such adaptation efforts in the Andes constitutes hegemonic, discursive practices that reproduce uneven geographies of power and subalternize “other” ways of knowing about, and responding to, climate change. This research probes questions of power and equity in multi-scalar adap...
CBPR is a complex process. In this article, we explore one part of that process: participation. Participation in CBPR is usually conceptualized as whether, and the degree to which, community members are involved in the research process. Our focus regarding participation is less on quantity and more on quality of the interaction between community members and researchers. We explore how interaction, as a participative act of the research interview , creates the space for participating and imagining. Out of this interaction come data that are elaborated, con-textualized, and, ultimately, from a CBPR perspective, made useful for meaningful engagement and community action. We start with a brief comparison between participant observation (PO) and CBPR in which we highlight different research perspectives associated with the two approaches. We review the historical development of the approaches in terms of their intended goals and outcomes, especially within the context of academia and research. We further suggest ways to integrate anthropological approaches to participation within CBPR. We then critically examine the deeply inter-personal interactions that occur while interviewing and explore how the context of the qualitative interview creates the place where both sides come together to share knowledge. Our focus is on situations where the researchers are engaging with communities who speak a different first language than that of the research team. Finally, we end by discussing the role of bridging in the act of participation and suggest some ways to enrich the concept of the bridge person. A fundamental and critical difference between PO and CBPR is that in PO anthropologists are supposed to spend their time trying to learn how to participate in communities and cultures that are often very different from their own. Abstract In this article, we anthropologically explore one part of the process of Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR): participation. Participation in CBPR is usually conceptualized as whether, and the degree to which, community members are involved in the research process. Our focus regarding participation is less on quantity and more on quality of the interaction between community members and researchers; within this context, we elaborate the concept of " bridging " as it is understood in CBPR. Using data from our ongoing " Water Project " in the Peruvian Andes, we explore how interaction, as a participative act of the research interview, creates the space for participating and imagining. Out of this interaction come data that are elaborated, contextualized, and, ultimately, from a CBPR perspective, made useful for meaningful engagement and community action.
Ecological ethics in the context of climate change: feminist and indigenous critique of modernity
From the personal to the political, from the individual to the efforts of entire nations, from green companies to the United Nations, climate change continues to worsen despite our “best efforts”. This paper examines the complexities of leadership, the reliance on traditional economics, and the complication of population growth, to outline the context and the possibilities for really transforming the dominant norms that are unable to avert increasing carbon dioxide equivalent emissions. Technology, ideas, and normalised practices peculiar to the modern world-view have created the conditions for our ¨uber-success but climate change shows us clearly that to be successful is not necessarily to flourish. To avoid continuing along the path of toxic excess we need to wean ourselves off the alienation that has been enabled by sceptical idealism and modern technology (Heidegger 1977). I want to suggest that our world-view needs to change, and say that the concept “world-view” itself privileges a solipsist orientation and we need to re-imagine ourselves as part of the world-scape. The concept of world-scape rather than world-view reflects a shift in approach to the interaction between people and environment. I take an important Maori concept of whenua and contemplate it in a contemporary context. I argue that the indigenous close relationship of people with the land and can be thought through again, and include a politics of difference, all held within the embrace of the placenta, or whenua. This world view is both contemporary, global, and fully engaged with the health and wellbeing of the environment and other people.
Heating it up: on knowledge, power, and the anthropology of climate change_Draft_EASA2020
2020
Paper short abstract: Observing a growing interest in knowledge and its production in anthropological studies on climate change, resilience, and local adaptation, this paper critically challenges such an epistemological understanding of knowledge as place-based, isolated, static and held by an imagined, homogenised other. Paper long abstract: This paper critically reviews current anthropological debates on knowledge production and climate change. It discusses power inequalities and the positioning of the anthropologist in ongoing research projects that are located in reception and observation studies, vulnerability assessments, and others. We observe that the way in which these projects engage with crucial questions in the emerging field of the anthropology of climate change, is a return to the use of arguments and methods brought up by early ethnoecological approaches. Just like its predecessor such ethno-climatological analysis carries the risk of reproducing dangerous ideas of homogenous, solitary groups, and unreflected hierarchies between local/place-based knowledge and globalised scientific knowledge. We aim to demonstrate the epistemological assumptions that are shaping the process of the anthropological inquiry about knowledge. Furthermore, we argue that research is influenced by utilitarian claims made in climate change adaptation projects and seldom reflects on the control and accessibility over its research outcomes and their uses. In response to this criticism, we argue for an anthropology transcending such binary conceptions of difference that needs to consider knowledge production as a process shaped by historical and current power structures. This requires the radical decolonisation of anthropology, its methods and approaches, the exploring of alternative methodologies and the recognition of dynamic connections and thinking beyond the boundaries of and imposed by western science. Finally, the realistic reflection of the systematic structures in which our discipline and we as researchers are entangled must be visualised, not only theoretically, but also in research practice.
2014
and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the KNAW public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain. • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the KNAW public portal. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.
INDIGENOUS WOMEN & CLIMATE CHANGE
INDIGENOUS WOMEN & CLIMATE CHANGE, 2020
Author: (Rocío Silva Santisteban) Number of pages: 154 ISBN number: 978-87-93961-00-5 Publication language: English Region publication is about: Latin America Financially supported by: Norwegian International Climate and Forest Initiative Release year: 2020 Release month/day: January, 15 Related partner: SERVINDI Intercultural Communication Service Against all the odds, and despite the challenges that climate change represents for Latin America, women are demonstrating day in, day out that they have the ideas and the unique and essential skills to propose a radical change in the matrix of civilisation at this crucial point in humankind’s history. This book, now being published in English, explores those challenges and this first edition differs slightly from the Spanish version published in January 2019. It seeks to go beyond simple public policy aspirations in order to reconsider the impacts of climate change on women on the basis of their actions of resistance, their daily practices, the links between these practices and the need to re-think their contributions from the centres of power.