Introduction to Political Ecology

Course goals

Content

Week 1 

Course Introduction: Political and Apolitical ecologies

https://unusualcollaborations.ewuu.nl/tools-methods/introductions-with-new-metaphor-cards/

Week 2 - The Industrial Working Class and the Origins of Political Ecology

In the mid-1800s, Karl Marx and his friend Frederick Engels wrote a good deal about the working class in Europe’s bourgeoning industrial cities. We learn from them how the “capitalist mode of production” sought to extract “surplus value” (profit) from labor power, only to leave those same laborers with low wages and without decent housing and sanitation.

Marxist theories were used to understand how modern cities were made through the harnessing of “nature” (food, fuel, water, raw materials, etc.) by human labor, a process Marx called “metabolism”. This and the following interactive lecture will provide a broad historical sweep of the evolution of political ecology, which draws on these historical observations, to study urban poverty, natural resource exploitation, and inequality.

Optional: 

Sultana, F. (2021). "Political Ecology 1: From the margins to the center." Progress in Human Geography, 45(1), 156–165

Week 3 - The Colonial Enterprise: Segregation, Discourse, and Subjectification 

In this interactive lecture, we turn to the colonial enterprise. Much of what we observe in the world today can be traced to processes of capitalist urbanization, as well as enduring legacies of the colonial encounter. Here, Orientalist knowledge and discursive frameworks aimed at controlling the native “other” become particularly important. In this lecture, we move beyond Marxian explanations and turn to the role of discourse, knowledge, and subjectification in shaping environments as read through postcolonial and critical race theory. 

Optional: 

Gandy, M. (2014). Mosquitoes, Modernity, and Postcolonial Lagos. In: The fabric of space : Water, modernity, and the urban imagination. MIT Press.

Week 4 - Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice

The rise of environmental justice as an activist movement and, subsequently, as a field of policy and scholarly analysis, was contemporaneous with the latter years of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. In South Africa, environmental justice became an important language of urban activist struggles during the latter years of apartheid rule. Over the last three decades environmental justice has become a rallying cry for communities and social movements across the world struggling to protect their environment and ways of life against the appropriation, transformation and dispossession of nature. This interactive lecture will discuss EJ as multivalent, “nourished by a radical plurality of justice claims”, from its origins to its more recent engagements with decolonial theory.

Optional: 

Rougeon, M., Mota, C. & Trad, L., (2023) “Environmental racism and environmental injustice: Decolonial inflections and new agendas in Latin America and Brazil”, Journal of Political Ecology 30(1), 699–715. 

Week 5 - Feminist political ecologies

Scholarship has questioned Political Ecology’s exclusive attention in class and made calls for a situated political ecology, examining power as “diffused and relational”, focusing on everyday practices and exploring power relations based on gender and intersectionality. This interactive lecture delves on Feminist Political Ecology, an interdisciplinary subfield of political ecology and feminism that puts gender at the center of nature-power relations. 

Optional: 

Shrestha, G., Joshi, D., & Clement, F. (2019). “Masculinities and hydropower in India: A feminist political ecology perspective.” International Journal of the Commons, 13(1), 130–152.

Week 6 - Mid-trimester trip to the museum (see separate handout)

MAKING 21ST CENTURY NATURES 

Week 7 - Climate Change and adaptation

The uneven impacts of climate change mean that differently-located people experience, respond to, and cope with the climate crisis and related vulnerabilities in radically different ways. In this lecture we will discuss how the coloniality of climate change operates through global racial capitalism, colonial dispossessions, and climate debts. We will discuss how to decolonize climate we need to address the complexities of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, international development, and geopolitics that contribute to the reproduction of ongoing “colonialities”. 

Optional: 

Sultana, Farhana. 2022. “Critical Climate Justice.” The Geographical Journal 188 (1): 118–124.

Week 8 - Energy and extractivisms

In this interactive lecture we explore how political ecology has analyzed the geographical causes of climate change, including the differential responsibilities of countries for fossil fuel consumption and land use change. We will delve on responses to climate change through energy policy. 

Week 9 - Biodiversity and conservation

In this lecture we examine how mainstream conservation approaches—such as protected areas, sustainable resource management plans, and market-based instruments—are largely rooted in Eurocentric ontologies and epistemologies that often universalize nature and marginalize local ways of knowing and relating to the environment. Political ecology offers a critical alternative, emphasizing that biodiversity conservation should move toward practices that are locally grounded, plural, socially just, and convivial, fostering more inclusive and equitable forms of caring for human and non-human life.

Optional: 

Lunstrum, E., Massé, F., Ashaba, I. M., Dutta, A., Marijnen, E., Mushonga, T., & Matose, F. (2025). Demilitarizing Conservation. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1–13. 

Week 10 Final class

Wrap-up Discussion – No readings due. Come prepared to discuss your favorite quotes, theories, and concepts from the readings.