Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Anthropology and Environment Society

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists

Primary Theme: Environment and Environmental Inequality

Secondary Theme: Race

(4-0840) In and Against Racial Capitalism and Environmental Injustice: Spaces of Resistance and Collective Being

Racial capitalism (Robinson 1983) recognizes the inextricable relationship between processes of racialization and the emergence, reproduction, intensification and expansion of capitalist social relations. The differential valuing that constitutes racial capitalism fundamentally harnesses, applies to and works through the natural environment, transforming peoples and places/environments simultaneously (Pulido 2016). Taking these linkages between racial capitalism and environment as a starting point, this panel contends with the possibilities and limits of resistance and being that emerge out of, exist in relation to, and seek to transform racialized processes of enclosure, dispossession, accumulation and commodification across places and times. How are people generating ecological modes of collective and communal being otherwise, within, or aside from racial capitalism? How do people resist and exist within and against the ecological and economic imperatives of racializing processes? What kinds of narratives, land practices, knowledge systems, political discourses and reciprocal relations do groups create? What are the intersections between land and collective being? The papers in this panel consider contexts ranging from the vibrant matter of immigrant urban gardening in San Jose, California; rural Afro-Caribbean Belizean Creole people and the transnational ecotourism, conservation and migration with which they live; indigenous and mestizo communities contending with dispossession, deforestation and industrial agriculture in Paraguay; imaginaries of development and epistemic (in)justices in the making and contesting of a REDD+ program in Ecuador; and transregional environmental justice activists who articulate solidarity through climate discourse.

Presenter(s)

• Gabriel Valle

  Assistant Professor
  California State University, San Marcos

Organizer(s)

• Melissa Johnson

  Professor of Anthropology
  Southwestern University

Presenter(s)

• Melissa Johnson

  Professor of Anthropology
  Southwestern University

• Cari Tusing

  University of Arizona

• Sylvia Cifuentes

  University of California, Santa Barbara

Organizer(s)

• Priya Chandrasekaran

  Lecturer
  Princeton University

Chair(s)

• Priya Chandrasekaran

  Lecturer
  Princeton University

Presenter(s)

• Priya Chandrasekaran

  Lecturer
  Princeton University

Presentations:

• 2:00 PM - 2:15 PM

  Learning to be Human Again: Food, Value and the Pursuit of Dignity
  Gabriel R. Valle – California State University, San Marcos
• 2:15 PM - 2:30 PM

  Becoming Creole: Human being otherwise in the midst of racial capitalism
  Melissa A. Johnson – Southwestern University
• 2:30 PM - 2:45 PM

  Racializing or Decolonizing Communal Property: Reproducing Marginal Natures in Northern Paraguay
  Cari Tusing – University of Arizona
• 2:45 PM - 3:00 PM

  'Sustainable agriculture' to reduce deforestation in the Amazon: a silver bullet or a case of green capitalism?
  Sylvia Cifuentes – University of California, Santa Barbara
• 3:00 PM - 3:15 PM

  (Re)Claiming “Climate Justice” for the Sake of Climate Justice: “Thinking With” Black Lives Matter
  Priya Rajalakshmi Chandrasekaran – Princeton University