Urban political ecology in prospect and retrospect

The contemporary theorization of the urban biosphere has reached something of an impasse between the perceived limitations of urban political ecology, the neo-Lefebvrian emphasis on global patterns of urbanization, and the rise of “new materialisms”. Since its emergence in the mid-1990s, urban political ecology has made a series of distinctive contributions to the study of urban environmental issues yet in recent years a series of conceptual tensions and empirical lacunae have become apparent. In this essay I reflect on the legacy of the “first wave” of urban political ecology scholarship and consider a series of contemporary challenges including more complex interpretations of agency, materiality, and subjectivity.

Indigenous Materialisms and Disciplinary Colonialism

As a starting point, this article looks at the nexus between New Materialisms and Indigenous Studies, concluding that the New Materialists' almost entire failure to interact with Indigenous knowledges and scholarship whilst employing the nomenclature ‘new’, is merely another over-exaggerated example of western claims to knowledge itself. The majority of the article discusses Indigenous Materialisms more specifically, introducing a new framework for defining eras of colonialism, namely ‘sovereignty colonialism’, ‘biopolitical’ or ‘disciplinary colonialism’, and ‘ security colonialism’. In the final third of the article, I focus on ‘biopolitical’ or ‘disciplinary colonialism’ in particular, fleshing out notions such as Indigenous materiality preceding thought, the materialism of colonisation including colonial sport, and the agency of Indigenous bodies to resist.

Sporting Scars

Taking inspiration from the ethico-onto-epistemological implications of new materialisms, this poem is a modest and partial attempt at experimenting with new ways of bringing my sporting past-present-future together to reimagine feminist politics, vulnerabilities, and the implications of sporting policies that continue to reinforce gender binaries, harming, and excluding so many. This piece of writing was triggered—in a visceral and unexpected way—by a surge of transphobic discourse in Aotearoa New Zealand society in 2021, with groups of athletes, pseudo-feminists, doctors, politicians, and the public protesting transgender women’s rights to participate in sport at elite and community levels.

Cinema and Environment: The Arts of Noticing in the Anthropocene

The aim of this paper is to raise questions about how cinema can allow us to rethink our relationship with the environment in the context of what is known today as the Anthropocene. In the discussion, I chart the current debates about the ecological in the humanities, with a particular focus on new materialisms, to argue that cinema can be fruitfully thought of as part of what anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015) calls the “arts of noticing”. I then turn to a consideration of the potential influx of affect theories on ecocriticism and film studies, before sketching out possible approaches to studying film from an affective, new materialist and postanthropocentric perspective. These approaches might have wider implications for rhetorical perspectives on cinema, especially for those investigating emotional appeals.