CFPs AAG 2021 Perspectives from Urban Political Ecology & Disaster Studies

I am really excited about a paper session I am co-organizing with Khristine Alvarez (University College London) and Dr. Dakila Kim P. Yee (University of the Philippines Visayas Tacloban College) for the upcoming AAG conference. I’m particularly excited that we have Dr. Jola Ajibade serving as our discussant. Her work looks at urban adaptation and disaster risk planning, with attention to the production of vulnerability, eco-gentrification, and uneven development.

Although I would love to be going to Seattle and will miss out on the opportunity to see colleagues I otherwise do not get to see in person, given the global pandemic shows no sign of slowing in the US, we are holding our paper session online. One of the advantages of this, is that we can hopefully expect more presenters from outside of the US who might otherwise not be able to come to the conference. Another advantage is that graduate students will not be expected by their departments to spend 5% of their annual income on one conference.

The CFP is below. Please contact me if you have any questions or suggestions!

 VIRTUAL Session: Perspectives from Urban Political Ecology & Disaster Studies

Sponsored by the Hazards, Risks and Disasters (HRD),  Human Dimensions of Global Change (HDGC) and Cultural and Political Ecology (CAPE) Specialty Groups

Session Organizers: , Emma Colven (University of Oklahoma), Khristine Alvarez (University College London) and Dr. Dakila Kim P. Yee (University of the Philippines Visayas Tacloban College)

Discussant: Dr. Jola Ajibade (Portland State University) 

Political ecology and disasters studies share much common ground. Both fields are committed to explaining the unequal distribution of environmental processes and risks; how socio-spatial positioning shapes our experiences of environmental processes/events; and the role of the state in creating and perpetuating environmental risks and inequalities. This is perhaps unsurprising given the strong influence of the hazards school (Burton et al., 1978) on early political ecology, and its intellectual origins in seeking to provide more critical perspective on hazards, and risk and vulnerability scholarship. 

Yet curiously, these fields have since developed largely independently from one another. The last decade has seen the emergence of scholarship bridging political ecology and disaster studies (Collins, 2008; Grove, 2014; Ajibade et al., 2013; Ajibade, 2017; Marks, 2015; Colven, 2017; Saguin, 2017); however, this approach remains marginal. We believe that urban political ecologists and disaster researchers could learn from one another in ways that would produce more theoretically robust, critical research that better serves marginalized communities and directly engages with policy and praxis. Disaster researchers, for instance, are generally more effective at linking theory to praxis. They have also contributed to advancing conceptualizations of vulnerability, risk and resilience, which are comparatively under-theorized in (urban) political ecology. At the same time, urban political ecology’s radical Marxist roots, critical perspectives on power, and concepts such as metabolism might find new resonances in the field of urban disaster studies. 

 The opportunity for engagement across these fields is pertinent at this current conjuncture. Coastal cities around the world are grappling with the realities of sea-level rise and increasingly severe storms; normative definitions of urban resilience that maintain the status quo have been adopted by city governments and transnational policy networks (Ajibade, 2017); and emergent research is demonstrating how urban adaptation projects often re-intrench inequalities in exposure, risk, and vulnerability (Alvarez & Cardenas 2019; Ajibade 2019), highlighting the urgent need for equitable and just adaptation and urban transformation. 

We invite theoretical, empirical, and methodological papers that explore one or more of the following topics:

• Hazard- and disaster-induced dispossession 

• Managed retreat and resettlement programs

• Bourgeois environmentalism and climate gentrification;

• Environmental and climate justice movements;

• Climate risk and insurance riskscapes;

• Critical perspectives on disaster ecology;

• (Global) racial capitalism and intersectional approaches to disaster research;

• Participatory planning and community-led disaster preparedness and response;

• Political ecologies of urban disasters;

• The material production of hazardscapes;

• Materialities and objects of urban disaster risk reduction;

• Climate adaptation and spatio-temporal reconfiguration of cities

• Resilience planning and socio-spatial fixes

• Gender and urban disasters

• Real estate development in marginal urban areas;

• Critical studies on urban disaster policies and policy networks;

• Studies that center marginalized and underrepresented communities;

• Spatialities of urban adaptation to climate change and natural disasters;

• Urban zoning, redlining and the production of environmental risk and vulnerability;

• Vulnerability studies of communities in low-income, rental and mobile housing.

Interested participants should send a title and abstract of no more than 250 words to emmacolven@ou.edu by November 6, 2020. Participants will be notified of acceptance by November 14 and asked to register for the conference and provide their PIN by November 19.

Relevant Literature

Ajibade, I. (2019). Planned retreat in Global South megacities: disentangling policy, practice, and environmental justice. Climatic Change, 157(2), 299-317.

Ajibade, I. (2017). Can a future city enhance urban resilience and sustainability? A political ecology analysis of Eko Atlantic city, Nigeria. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 26, 85-92.

 Ajibade, I., McBean, G., & Bezner-Kerr, R. (2013). Urban flooding in Lagos, Nigeria: Patterns of vulnerability and resilience among women. Global Environmental Change, 23(6), 1714-1725. 

Ajibade, I and Gordon McBean (2014). Climate extremes and housing rights: A political ecology of impacts, early warning and adaptation constraints in Lagos slum communities. Geoforum (55), 76–86.

Alvarez, M. K., & Cardenas, K. (2019). Evicting slums, ‘building back better’: Resiliency Revanchism and disaster risk management in Manila. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 43(2), 227–249.  

Bogard, W.C. (1989). Bringing social theory to hazards research: conditions and consequences of the mitigation of environmental hazards. Sociological Perspectives, 31, 147-68. 

Burton, I., Kates, R.W. and White, G.F. (1978). The environment as hazard. New York: Oxford University Press. 

Colven, E. (2017) Understanding the allure of big infrastructure: Jakarta’s Great Garuda Wall Project. Water Alternatives, 10(2), 250-264.

Eriksen, C., & Simon, G. (2017). The Affluence–Vulnerability Interface: Intersecting scales of risk, privilege and disaster. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 49(2), 293-313.

Grove, K. (2014). Biopolitics and adaptation: governing socio-ecological contingency through climate change and disaster studies. Geography Compass 8(3), 198-210

Grove, K., Cox, S., & Barnett, A. (2020). Racializing Resilience: Assemblage, Critique, and Contested Futures in Greater Miami Resilience Planning. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 110(5), 1613-1630.

Jon, I. (2019). Resilience and ‘technicity’: challenges and opportunities for new knowledge practices in disaster planning. Resilience, 7(2), 107-125.

Koslov, L. (2019). Avoiding climate change: “Agnostic adaptation” and the politics of public silence. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(2), 568-580.

Marks, D. (2015). The Urban Political Ecology of the 2011 Floods in Bangkok: The Creation of Uneven Vulnerabilities. Pacific Affairs, 88 (3), 623-651. 

Mustafa, D. The production of an urban hazardscape in Pakistan: Modernity, vulnerability, and the range of choice. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95(3), 566-586.

 Ramalho, J. (2019). Worlding aspirations and resilient futures: Framings of risk and contemporary city‐making in Metro Cebu, the Philippines. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 60 (1), 24-36.

Saguin, K. (2017). Producing an urban hazardscape beyond the city. Environment and Planning A, 49(9), 1968-1985. 

Sultana, F. (2010) Living in hazardous waterscapes: Gendered vulnerabilities and experiences of floods and disasters. Environmental Hazards, 9(1), 43-53.

Weinstein, L., Rumbach, A., & Sinha, S. (2019). Resilient growth: Fantasy plans and unplanned developments in India’s flood-prone coastal cities. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 43(2), 273– 291. 

Yee, D. K. P. (2018). Constructing reconstruction, territorializing risk: imposing “no-build zones” in post-disaster reconstruction in Tacloban City, Philippines. Critical Asian Studies, 50(1), 103-121.

Zeiderman, A. (2012). On shaky ground: The making of risk in Bogotá. Environment and Planning A, 44(7), 1570–1588.

VIDEO Public Talk: A Political Ecology of Speculative Urbanism | LSE SEAC

The talk that I gave last week as part of the LSE SEAC Seminar Series was recorded and has been posted to Facebook. You can access and watch the talk via this link.

Upcoming Online Talk hosted by Saw Swee Southeast Asian Studies Center

I'll excited to be giving a talk next Wed 14 Oct on the political ecology of speculative urbanism in Jakarta. The talk is hosted by the Saw Swee Southeast Asian Studies Center at the London School of Economics, as part of their autumn seminar series. The talk ties together my prior work on urban flood management in Jakarta, with my new research focus on the relationship between speculative finance and water crises.

6am PST / 9am EST / 8pm Jakarta.

Registration is required to attend but is free: https://lnkd.in/d-3hWsb Also check out the other great seminars planned!

New Article: Subterranean Infrastructures in a Sinking City

Earlier this year, I published a new article in Critical Asian Studies, titled “Subterranean infrastructures in a sinking city: the politics of visibility in Jakarta”. The essay looks at the politics of flood infrastructure in Jakarta, and explores in particular the relationship between visibility and invisibility, and above-ground and below-ground interventions. Jakarta is well known for it’s annual flooding, and flood events have been devastating in recent years. Most recently, the New Years floods of 2020 brought flash floods through the central city and took the lives of more than 60 people.

One of Jakarta’s most challenging environmental problems - of which there are no shortage - is land subsidence.

Land subsidence, primarily caused by excessive groundwater extraction, damages infrastructure and buildings, and contributes to worsened flood events and tidal inundation. Yet, while land subsidence was first identified as an issue in 1989, groundwater extraction has only recently been regulated. My essay asks why land subsidence remained unaddressed for so long.

Scholarship in infrastructure studies has tended to categorize infrastructure as either hyper-visible by design, or invisible until breakdown. My essay extends theoretical engagements with infrastructure by examining how visibility, aesthetics, and materiality shape urban flood risk governance in Jakarta. I show how spectacular, visible forms of infrastructures generate public and political attention, while below ground, hidden and invisible infrastructures are overlooked and politically unpopular to address. This has resulted in city authorities prioritizing the implementation of large-scale infrastructural interventions (sea walls, canal systems, river normalization) to reduce the impacts of flooding instead of addressing land subsidence.

You can read the article here, or email me directly for a PDF at emmacolven@ou.edu.

Black Lives Matter: a letter to my students

Dear students,

It has now been a little more than two weeks since George Floyd was brutally murdered by police officers in Minneapolis, and people across the US began marching, protesting and campaigning for change. George Floyd's death follows the deaths of many other Black people at the hands of police, particularly women and trans people. (I encourage you to look at the #SayHerName hashtag on Twitter, created by Kimberlé Crenshaw).

It is also Pride Month, which honors the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan NYC, a hugely significant moment in the gay liberation movement in the United States. Interestingly, activists have draw parallels between the current moment and 1969, pointing to the fact that Stonewall was a "riot", much in the same way that recent events have been described by the media and commentators.

I am writing to you all at this difficult (and, I imagine for many of you, traumatizing) time in order to reiterate my support for each and every one of you, regardless of your sexuality, nationality, gender identity, race/ethnicity, political values or religious beliefs. I also want to echo calls across OU campus and across the US for an end to police brutality and violence against Black people as well as communities of color more broadly, and condemn all forms of discrimination and oppression that many of you may encounter in your lives. 

As a board member on two specialty groups of the American Association of Geographers, I have collaborated over the past week or so with other geographers across the US to draft official statements to condemn racism and police brutality, and (more importantly) discussing short and long term actions we will take to address racism in our discipline and our institutions. If you'd like to know more about this, please ask me.

To those of you who self-identify as students of color: please know that I will always advocate for you, and strive to take action to address racism and be a good ally/accomplice on and off campus. Below are some resources that you might find useful for taking care of yourself and your communities during this moment. I found these via The Steve Fund, an organization that promotes the mental health and wellbeing of college students of color:

• Self-Care Tips for Black People Who Are Struggling With This Very Painful Week

• Tool-kit: Healing in the Face of Cultural Trauma

• Racial Trauma Tool-kit

To those of you who, like me, self-identify as white and/or are interested in better understanding racism and anti-racist scholarship: I encourage you to look for resources to educate yourselves on the history of racism in the United States, and to better understand how you can contribute to supporting anti-racism efforts such as the Black Lives Matter movement. I strive to be anti-racist in my professional and personal life, and this is something I am learning how to do better all the time. This work is never done. Resources for ongoing education include:

• "The Minneapolis Syllabus"

• "The Black Geographies Reading List"

• "An Antiracist Reading List" by Ibram X. Kendi

• "Reading Towards Abolition: A Reading List on Policing, Rebellion, and the Criminalization of Blackness" compiled by The Abusable Past Collective 

• "Abolition Study", a reading list compiled by Drs. Ashanté Reese and SA Smythe

There are also many books on these topics. I am happy to provide some recommendations, though the New York Times nonfiction bestsellers list for this week is a great place to start. 

Black Lives Matter. In solidarity, 

Emma