“Critical Restoration Geographies”, a public reading group, is an invitation to un-think and re-think the embodied and ecological practices of restoration (Doshi 2017). To do so means shifting away from the narratives of return, wholeness, and health in favor of process, practice, and partiality. The former, we suggest, enforce a normativity that impinges upon divergent ways of living and being. Accordingly, this reading group brings a critical lens onto ecological restoration projects from intersecting struggles around disability justice, racial justice, and environmental justice (Jampel 2018). While the readings are separated into distinct lists, these struggles, among those of decolonization and abolition, are inextricable. Thinking about restoration through these bodies of work, which are at once social movements and academic interventions, sheds additional light on our understandings of justice and how it relates to the socioecological process and potential called “restoration”.
Both emergent and generative, our approach to restoration studies is critical in that it presses upon closures while simultaneously forging openings and possibilities. Consequently, it is the interdependence of all beings, human and non-human, that are centered across these readings. Indeed, restoration cannot be reduced to any singular bodymind (a disability studies term that undermines the distinction between the “body” and “mind”), patch of land, or temporality. Critical restoration geographies, then, are about the restoration of relations among and between such configurations. Looking critically at restoration destabilizes the grounds and boundaries of environmental work and opens up space for recognizing the role of spiritual and cultural work in the process of restoration (Kimmerer 2011).
Critical restoration also contends with multiple temporalities: the urgency of the moment, the longevity of the overarching goals, and connections of the past and future in the present. Survival both precedes and is co-extensive with the restoration of relations. We acknowledge that we can “trace the past to the present and the present to the past through geography” (McKittrick 2013). We also understand that there is a vital need for critical restoration geographies given climate change, persistent health inequities, and the ways extractive relations exceed planetary boundaries. But, getting critical with restoration reminds us that apocalypses have already happened for many and apocalypse dreams might be part colonial fabulation. How, if at all, can stories of restoration be re-told? In asking these questions, a critical restoration geographies approach forwards just transitions while also pointing us toward speculative imagining and radical planning. In doing so, we engage abolitionist and decolonial initiatives, arguing that the prospect of just and abundant futures cannot be de-linked from liberation and must be prefigured in the present (Heynen and Ybarra 2020). Restoration is not an end-point, or, seen otherwise, there is no end to restoration.
As a public reading group, we extend a broad invitation to connect across both theory and praxis, and gather as scholars, as activists, as practitioners, as artists, among many. Through online forums and as a virtual group at DoPE11, we hope to bring all of our partial and situated knowledges together, to build processual spaces and community to discuss, learn, and apply. We recognize that there is no singular way to approach or come to critical restoration. As graduate students with a wide range of interests, this has been true for us and is reflected in the lists we have put together thus far. In convening across upcoming months, we look forward to considering together: what are critical restoration geographies (in your scholarship, activism, practice, art); how can we collectively and sustainably practice them across disciplines; and what are the potentials, tensions, and limits of restoration as a frame for building more just relations?
DoPE11 Reading Group Structure
The Critical Restoration Geographies public reading group will meet once during the DoPE11 conference at 1pm (ET) on February 20th, 2021. We also invite engagement across platforms such as our Forum to share ideas before, during, and after the session.
Our DoPE11 session conversation will be two-part:
- Meanders involving smaller group conversations based on one of three subthemes (participants will select in advance), and
- Headwaters, a whole group conversation together on our grounding texts and critical restoration more generally.
- There will also be a 45 minute break in between in which we encourage everyone to step away from their screen and rest their eyes
We welcome participants to choose whichever readings amongst the meanderings they find interesting or relevant to them and encourage everyone to read the groundings texts. Again, while the meanderings and groundings are separated, the struggles they engage with, among those of decolonization and abolition, necessarily intersect.
Please indicate your preference for Meanders as you register for the reading group (including the option to participate only in the Headwaters conversation). We hope to match participants with their preferred choice, but may need to make adjustments due to capacity constraints. We will confirm Meandering groupings in mid-January after reading group registration has closed.
CritRest Home | Meanders | Reading Lists | Sign Up! [registration has closed]