Political ecology as a subfield within anthropology and geography has grown enormously in the past few decades. From looking at land degradation in the 1980s with an explicitly Marxian perspective, political ecology has come a long way, exploring wide-ranging questions and processes today (for instance, studying environmental conflicts to transgenes to biopower and beyond), from equally diverse theoretical perspectives, including Marxist, feminist, Foucauldian, and postcolonial studies. This course is an examination of this exciting field of interdisciplinary scholarship, with a special focus on environmental struggles and popular resistance. We will examine the political economic contexts of environmental transformations, as well as the ways in which our understandings of nature are materially and discursively bound up with notions of culture, identity, and power. The course is divided into five sections – foundations of political ecology, political economies of nature, neoliberalism and environmental governance, agrarian questions, and environmental struggles and popular resistance – each one engaged with a rich set of case studies and theoretical analyses. At the end of this course, students will have a deeper understanding of both the field of political ecology as well as the problematic of resistance in nature-society relations.
mitul.baruah@ashoka.edu.in