Call for Proposals: Palestinian Landscapes & Liberatory Ecologies (Deadline Extended!)

دعوة للمشاركة في المدرسة الخريفية للإيكولوجيا السياسية في فلسطين

رابط للدعوة لتقديم مقترحات  -  link to Arabic Call for Proposals

Above: Telfit/Jalqamous area near Jenin. Gabi Kirk, March 2022

DEADLINE EXTENDED to September 30, submit here

The Political Ecology Research Group - Palestine and Dimensions of Political Ecology (DOPE) invite abstract submissions for the conference “Palestinian Landscapes & Liberatory Ecologies”. The conference is part of the Political Ecology Autumn School and will take place from November 9th-10th, 2024 in Ramallah, Palestine, and online. 

The genocide in Gaza is the most recent iteration of the ongoing Nakbeh. Alongside the cleansing of people in the Gaza Strip, the destruction of the Strip itself has wiped out Palestinian institutions of knowledge and culture, including universities, museums, town and city archives, cultural heritage sites, and religious centers. While the world watches the horrors unfold, settlers in the West Bank are enclosing water and pastures, confiscating land, livestock, and agricultural machinery from farmers and pastoralists, and isolating Palestinian communities through settler infrastructural development. In Palestine, as in the rest of the world, ecological imperialism is at the vanguard of the settler onslaught. This moment requires transnational networks of solidarity and political commitments through and beyond the current crisis that bridge social movements, environmental practice, and intellectual endeavours.

Palestine has been a laboratory for forms of settler exploitation, extraction, and erasure. As such, we foreground Palestine as a site that creates political ecological theory. Together, we sink deeply into what Palestine and Palestinians teach our field about a materialist history of dispossession and critical theorization of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Furthermore, Palestine teaches political ecologists around the world how to resist apartheid and genocide, which not only violently impacts Palestinian people and ecologies, but also weaponizes hunger, food, and the environment itself. 

We foreground Palestinian scholarship in institutions and on the ground, contributing to global discourses about agrarianism, land, and liberation. In doing so, we remind that environmental and agroecological scholarship from Palestine not only teaches us about death but also offers urgently-needed insights on life and the possibilities of survival, sovereignty, and hope. Together, our collective demonstrates the enduring legacy of Palestine as a site of knowledge production for geographic theory, as well as an impetus for radical geography’s transnational solidarities against the legacies of the colonial project.

We invite scholars in Palestine and beyond to submit abstracts for research, teaching, or political organizing presentations based on the themes below. We envision this conference to be dialogic between Palestine and the world. Scholars and activists outside of Palestine are strongly encouraged to propose work that draws on the intellectual and material contributions of Palestinian struggle to shape and connect to global discourses in political ecology.  In so doing, the broader aim is to push the boundaries of political ecology and expand it into directions that can further inform the question of Palestine and vice versa. We imagine submissions can come from any part of the world that draw on theories, methods, and examples from Palestine to inform their analysis, as well as reflections and non-traditional presentations that connect with Palestinian struggle transnationally to inform and expand political ecology to more robustly engage with Palestine as a site that creates geographic and ecological praxis. 

We invite contributions that address the following themes: 

Ecological Imperialism, Climate Change, and Landscape Transformation

Political Ecology of Infrastructure, Toxicity, and Waste

Agriculture, Food, and More than Human Entanglements 

Decolonial Political Ecology and Indigenous Ontologies

Mobility, Mapping, and Land Based Pedagogies

Urban and Rural Political Ecology

Militarized and Carceral Ecologies 

Digital Technology, Surveillance, and Resistance 

Sovereignty: Food, Land, and Water

 Political ecologies of Displacement, Refugees, and Return

Commons, Musha’, Cooperation, and Enclosure

We expressly invite papers from a wide range of disciplines, such as geography, history, sociology, anthropology, agrarian studies, food studies, economics and other related disciplines. We are open to research presentations in different stages and genres, as well as other genres, such as artistic pieces, poetry, communal engagements, and other creative formats. Early reflections and works in progress are warmly welcome. 

If you are interested in presenting your research, please fill out this form (embedded below) and submit an abstract of 300-400 words, including your institutional affiliation, by September 30, 2024. Successful applicants will be notified of our decision by October 10, 2024. Accepted applicants will be asked to attend an online pre-session orientation at least a week before the conference. 

This conference is part of “Palestinian Landscapes & Liberatory Ecologies: Cultivating transnational communities of practice” Autumn School. Presenters are strongly encouraged to attend. The school starts November 7th and is held daily from 9:00 AM ET-3:00 PM ET. Selected portions of the conference  will be available, recorded and posted for the public. 

For more information on the DOPE+Palestine collaboration click here. 

If you are interested but cannot present at this conference, we invite you to reach out to us about participating in our pre-AAG conference in Detroit, Michigan, next March. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at dopepluspal@gmail.com. 

This conference and the Autumn school are funded by the Antipode Foundation’s “Right to the Discipline Grant”.