Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Anthropology and Environment Society

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists

Primary Theme: Anthropocene

Secondary Theme: Climate Change

(5-0020) Adaptation Otherwise

If what Tsing means by precarity is the “failure of the lying promise of modern progress” (Haraway, 2016:37), then this contemporary moment of high modernity is indeed the condition of living precariously. Paying attention to precarity in sites of capitalist climatic ruination helps to illuminate profoundly diverse forms of relational dependence between local and distant human and non-human others. Social critique has been instrumental in bringing into sharp relief unyielding capitalist and colonial processes of capture and dispossession continuing through green technologies and late-liberal discourses of sustainability, adaptation, and resilience (Rademacher, 2011; Reid, 2014; Fairhead, Leach and Scoones, 2012; Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2014; Sovacool, et al. 2014). Motivated by a Gramscian “optimism of the will,” the papers of this panel speak to new modes of resisting the continuation of a modernist conceit and myth of capitalist progress in post-colonial and peri-capitalist landscapes. Drawing from a range of geographic contexts, we strive to illuminate cases that help us to think alternatively about, and present alternatives for, the dominant social project of adaptation that all too often reifies uneven power-relations and forms of oppression through a logic of neoliberal resilience. The collection of these papers engages with theoretical topics such as, “designing otherwise” (Escobar, 2018), “livable collaborations” (Tsing, 2015: 255), “reclaiming the commons” and “alternative economies” (Gibson-Graham, Cameron and Healy, 2013).

Organizer(s)

• Jamie Haverkamp

  PhD Candidate
  University of Maine

Chair(s)

• Jamie Haverkamp

  PhD Candidate
  University of Maine

Presenter(s)

• Jamie Haverkamp

  PhD Candidate
  University of Maine

• Alexander Rezk

  The University of Maine

• Janna Lafferty

  Florida International University, Department of Global & Sociocultural Studies

• Sarah Ebel

  PhD Candidate
  University of Maine

• Florence Durney

  University of Arizona

Presentations:

• 8:00 AM - 8:15 AM

  Collaborative Gatherings for Adaptation Otherwise in the Peruvian Highlands
  Jamie A. Haverkamp – University of Maine
• 8:15 AM - 8:30 AM

  Guarding What Remains: Examining the Ghosts of Ecological Trauma as a Path Toward Alternative Resilience
  Alexander Mitchell Rezk – The University of Maine
• 8:30 AM - 8:45 AM

  The Salmon People and Geographies of Livability in Coast Salish Homelands: Biocapitalism and the Geopolitics of Settlement
  Janna L. Lafferty – Florida International University, Department of Global & Sociocultural Studies
• 8:45 AM - 9:00 AM

  Adaptation, Conflict, and Struggles for Power in a Chilean Small-Scale Fishing Community Undergoing a Rapidly Changing Oceanscape
  Sarah Ebel – University of Maine
• 9:00 AM - 8:00 AM

  The Cost of Adaptation: Marine Protected Areas, Customary Tenure, and Small Scale Fishing Communities in Eastern Indonesia
  Florence Durney – University of Arizona