scholarly journals Artificial lawn people

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 548-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Brooks ◽  
Robert A Francis
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Online Discussion ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Environmental Values ◽  
Cultural Expectations ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Artificial Grass ◽  
Political Ecologies ◽  
Dynamic Relationships ◽  
Shed Light

This paper explores a new artificial political ecology through a novel digital methodology. The emotional impacts of the replacement of living turfgrass landscapes with synthetic simulacra are researched via a netnography of animated and polarised online discussion. We investigate how the cultural use of domestic lawns has extended into the creation of non-living artificial lawns and how the environmental values of these new landscapes are debated. Synthetic polymer (plastic) grasses are increasingly being used as alternatives to turfgrass in domestic gardens, changing urban ecologies. We examine the emotional landscapes that are reproduced in online discourse. Paul Robbins showed that a certain suite of behaviours constitutes ‘Lawn People’. Here we demonstrate that ‘Artificial Lawn People’ act in reference to cultural expectations of a ‘good’ lawn to produce non-living, homogeneous, green and tidy gardens, yet their actions spark fierce criticism from others who do not value this new synthetic nature. Our research involved analysis of 948 online discussion posts, and introduces a secondary notion of ‘artificial people’ as our subjects were anonymous contributors to virtual public debates on the environment: generating impassioned polyvocal contestation. Mumsnet.com is a space of heated discussion between proponents and opponents of artificial lawns. We identify three topics: (i) emotional responses: artificial grass is polarising, and its social value contested; (ii) bio-physical affects: plastic fibres impact human and non-human life and (iii) environmental values: turfgrass replacement influences local and global political ecologies. The conclusions shed light on the dynamic relationships between the emotional values of living and non-living landscapes.

Another Geopolitics? International Relations and the Boundaries of World Order

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regan Burles
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
International System ◽  
World Order ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Ecological Change ◽  
Ecological Theories ◽  
Problems And Solutions ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract Geopolitics has become a key site for articulating the limits of existing theories of international relations and exploring possibilities for alternative political formations that respond to the challenges posed by massive ecological change and global patterns of violence and inequality. This essay addresses three recent books on geopolitics in the age of the Anthropocene: Simon Dalby's Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability (2020), Jairus Victor Grove's Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (2019), and Bruno Latour's Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime (2018). The review outlines and compares how these authors pose contemporary geopolitics as a problem and offer political ecology as the ground for an alternative geopolitics. The essay considers these books in the context of critiques of world politics in international relations to shed light on both the contributions and the limits of political ecological theories of global politics. I argue that the books under review encounter problems and solutions posed in Kant's critical and political writings in relation to the concepts of epigenesis and teleology. These provoke questions about the ontological conceptions of order that enable claims to world political authority in the form of a global international system coextensive with the earth's surface.

Vasile Aaron – Reporta din vis, o noutate literară din vreme

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 53-59
Author(s):  
Carmen Oprișor
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
The Real ◽  
Romanian Literature ◽  
Shed Light

Vasile Aaron (1780-1821) had an important contribution to the modernization of the Romanian literature. He was also the representative of the Transylvanian Enlightenment School. One of his works which is worth mentioning is Reporta din vis (Reporta in his dream), a meditation upon the ephemeral human life. Here, the author brought in elements of novelty such as the “dream-in-a-dream” images, the pre-Romantic motif of the ruins or the first fantastic descriptions in the Romanian poetical works. All Aaron´s literary and social activity reflected the specific features of his age. The complete studies written by Liliana Popa and Nicolae Popa shed light upon Aaron’s life and work and they showed the real dimensions of his personality.

scholarly journals POWER-KNOWLEDGE RELATIONS IN THE FIELD OF POLITICAL ECOLOGY

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
ENRIQUE LEFF
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
The World ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Open Dialogue

Abstract The current environmental crisis calls for thinking about the state of the world: the thermodynamic-ecological and symbolic-cultural conditions of organic and human life on the planet. In this regard, it stresses the need to realize the unawareness and life’s unsustainability that humanity has created. In this text I discuss and take a stand about some of the concepts and founding and constitutive research lines of political ecology. In this way I pretend to open dialogue by placing in context some of the principles, ideas, and founding viewpoints of political ecology in Latin America and contrasting them with those from the English-speaking school of thought. I intend not only to establish a political socio-geography, but to question the epistemic core of political ecology, and to stimulate a more cosmopolitan critical thinking in order to be able to face the hegemonic powers that lead the world into social and environmental decay

scholarly journals Cosmopolitanism, Translocality, Astronoetics: A Multi-Local Vantage Point

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-38
Author(s):  
Gabriela Vargas-Cetina ◽  
Manpreet Kaur Kang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Special Volume ◽  
Multiple Flows ◽  
The World ◽  
Shed Light

The world in which we live is crisscrossed by multiple flows of people, information, non-human life, travel circuits and goods. At least since the Sixteenth Century, the Americas have received and generated new social, cultural and product trends. As we see through the case studies presented here, modern literature and dance, the industrialization of food and the race to space cannot be historicized without considering the role the Americas, and particularly the United States, have played in all of them. We also see, at the same time, how these flows of thought, art, science and products emerged from sources outside the Americas to then take root in and beyond the United States. The authors in this special volume are devising conceptual tools to analyze this multiplicity across continents and also at the level of particular nations and localities. Concepts such as cosmopolitanism, translocality and astronoetics are brought to shed light on these complex crossings, giving us new ways to look at the intricacy of these distance-crossing flows. India, perhaps surprisingly, emerges as an important cultural interlocutor, beginning with the idealized, imagined versions of Indian spirituality that fueled the romanticism of the New England Transcendentalists, to the importance of Indian dance pioneers in the world stage during the first part of the twentieth century and the current importance of India as a player in the race to space. 

scholarly journals Visceral Encounters: A Political Ecology of Urban Land, Food, and Housing in Dubuque, Iowa

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 122
Author(s):  
Chennault ◽  
Klavitter ◽  
Sutton
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Community Gardens ◽  
The Body ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Community Gardening ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Racial Relations ◽  
Food Gardening ◽  
Political Ecologies

Through a praxis of co-authorship between a university scholar and two community gardeners/organizers/activists, this article showcases the ways in which knowledge, practices, and relationalities emergent in community gardens in Dubuque, Iowa USA directly engage with the politics of food, land, and housing. The authors engage in co-authorship across university and community boundaries to ontologically reframe knowledge production and draw critical attention to the everyday livelihoods and political ecologies experienced within marginalized communities. We use extended conversations and interviews to analyze the food, land, and housing issues that emerge in the context of uneven racial relations and neighborhood revitalization. We then organize our analysis using a Political Ecology of the Body (PEB) framework to consider how people’s bodily, emotional, and social lives impact their relationalities with food, gardening, and neighborhood spaces. Our findings show that community gardening efforts are transforming the Washington and North End neighborhoods—even if these changes appear to outsiders to be small-scale or difficult to measure—while also calling attention to the anti-oppression and anti-racism work that remains to be done. Our co-authorship demonstrates how community gardeners and university partners can work together to contest histories of marginalization and foster more socially just relations.

scholarly journals Centering the Korle Lagoon: exploring blue political ecologies of E-Waste in Ghana

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 448
Author(s):  
Peter C Little ◽  
Grace Abena Akese
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Ecological Restoration ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Flood Control ◽  
Risk Mitigation ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
River System ◽  
Toxic Waste ◽  
Restoration Project ◽  
Political Ecologies

<p>Among emerging studies of the global political economy and ecology of electronic waste (or e-waste), few directly explore the already complex waste trades and materialities in relation to the general political ecology of water, flood control, dredging, and neoliberal ecological restoration. Even fewer focus on how this political-ecological challenge is unfolding in a West African context where ocean-based e-waste trades have played a dominant role. This article engages this particular domain of blue economic critique by focusing on Ghana in general and what we shall call "blue political ecologies of e-waste" in particular. The article focuses on e-waste politics unfolding in and around the Korle Lagoon in Accra, Ghana. The Korle Lagoon is an urban marine space of intensive land use, toxic waste disposal, social life, and urban ecological restoration. Amidst heavy contamination, there are attempts to rehabilitate the lagoon through the Korle Lagoon Ecological Restoration Project, an ecological science and restoration project focused on the Lagoon and its river system in the metropolitan area of Accra. It showcases the neoliberal complexities of ecological restoration. Importantly, situated in a multi-use marine environment, the project also highlights, we argue, a political ecological moment that is both about things 'blue', like water quality concerns, but also about other things non-blue such as contestation over land and housing, 'green' international NGO intervention on e-waste risk mitigation, and desires for new urban ecologies. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2015 and 2018, this article contributes to blue political-ecological research and critique in Africa by asking: how do e-waste politics leak into discussions of the blue economy along the Korle Lagoon in Ghana? What are the promises and prospects of a blue political ecology of e-waste in general, and in Africa in particular?</p><strong>Key Words</strong>: Political ecology, Ghana, e-waste, lagoon contamination, ecological restoration

The History of Agriculture in Ethiopia

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James C. McCann
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Smallholder Farmers ◽  
Animal Husbandry ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Agricultural Landscapes ◽  
Irrigated Agriculture ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Current Form ◽  
Political Ecologies ◽  
Over Time

Ethiopia’s highlands and their lowland peripheries offer a distinctive and, in many ways, ideal setting for human habitation and the evolution of agricultural ecologies. The ranges in climate variability by season and over time framed a sophisticated set of crops, agricultural practices, and local political ecologies. Chief among these was the development and use of the single-tine ox-plow (i.e., the ard or scratch plow) that integrated endemic annual crops with secondary crop introductions and, in some areas, cultivated or intercropped with perennial crops such as ensete and coffee. Animal husbandry to sustain animal traction and pastoral livelihoods in regional ecologies was essential, over time, to regional economies and their political ecologies. Agricultural patterns existed at the heart of cultural diversities and periods of political conflict and accommodations. In some areas of the south (Sidamo), southeast (Harar highlands), and southwest (Jimma), coffee cultivation complemented annual grain cropping. Yet the plow in its current form as a dominant tool appears in rock painting dating as far back as 500 ad. That technology was both efficient and persistent. While Ethiopia’s plow agriculture dominated the region’s political ecology over more than two millennia, in the late 20th century Ethiopia’s agrarian economy began an inexorable set of changes. New crops (such as maize), urbanization, and global migration of peoples and commodities (oil seeds, fibers, and grains) brought new seeds, inputs, and pressures to adapt to change, particularly for smallholder farmers and new enterprises. Heavy investments in dams and irrigated agriculture also foretell new agricultural landscapes of riverain areas that will need to coexist with the classic highland smallholder farms. The story of maize in Ethiopia’s agricultural history is emblematic of the struggle between pressures for change and the inertia of tradition felt by farmers. Their agrarian adaptation to new methods, new materials, and a new climate will play itself out in existing geographies and natural contours.

Mapping the field of religious environmental politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 96 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-363
Author(s):  
Jeremy Kidwell
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Environmental Politics ◽  
Environmental Values ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Personal Belief ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
The Many ◽  
High Level ◽  
Movement Organizations

Abstract Until fairly recently, consideration of religion has been marginal or even non-existent in the scholarly discourse about environmental politics. Renewed attention to the intersection of these fields has been encouraged by a recent widening in discussions of ‘environmental values’ to include the role of religious institutions and personal belief in forming spiritual environmental values and renewed attention to the place of ethics and religious institutions in global environmental politics. Following a range of historic declarations by religious leaders, the recent encyclical by Pope Francis signalled a new level of integration between Catholic concerns for social and environmental justice. Yet, much of the continued engagement by large environmental NGOs and governments has continued to ignore the complex interrelation of local, intermediate and transnational religious political ecology. In this article, which is based on data gathered during five years of fieldwork, primarily with British Christian REMOs (religious environmental movement organizations), I probe the complexities of political engagement with religious environmentalism which arise from the many different organizational iterations these groups may take. On the basis of such investigation I suggest that effective high-level engagement with REMO groups will be greatly enhanced by a nuanced understanding of the many different shapes that these groups can take, the various scales at which these groups organize, and the unique inflection that political action and group identity can take in a religious context.

SO THAT THE BABY NOT BE FORMED LIKE A POTTERY RATTLE: AZTEC RATTLE FIGURINES AND HOUSEHOLD SOCIAL REPRODUCTIVE PRACTICES

2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Overholtzer
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Work Relationships ◽  
Central Mexico ◽  
Healing Rituals ◽  
Household Ritual ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Bodily Representation

AbstractThis paper examines the materiality—or the mutually constitutive relationships between people and things—of Aztec rattle figurines in order to shed light on household ritual life in Postclassic central Mexico. By examining iconographic, archaeological, and ethnohistoric evidence, I argue that these figurines were actively used in household healing rituals concerning successful biological and social reproduction, comprised of the work, relationships, and attitudes that perpetuate human life. I then consider the physical experience of that ritual use by exploring the visual, tactile, auditory, and physiological aspects of these figurines. I contend that their visibility in workshops, markets, and the home presented an image of the female body that reinforced women's important roles in the production and reproduction of the household and society. Finally, the material qualities of these figurines reveal ancient discourses on the human body and experimentation with bodily representation in terms of scale, form, and material.

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