Representation and Environmental Justice: Exploring Marginalization, Resistance and Empowerment in Environmental Representations of and from the Periphery

A special issue of Genealogy (ISSN 2313-5778).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 January 2025 | Viewed by 5354

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
Interests: environmental justice

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Guest Editor
Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä, P.O. Box 35, FI-40014 Jyväskylä, Finland
Interests: epistemic justice; the legitimacy of knowledges and knowers

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Guest Editor
School of Education, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G3 6NH, UK
Interests: social justice language education

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Genealogy is now accepting submissions for a Special Issue on the theme of Representation and Environmental Justice. Representation is deeply implicated in issues of environmental justice. It can be argued that how human, non-human/more-than-human communities, knowledges and environments are constructed in environmental discourses, i.e., their representation, is key to whether they are treated equitably across space and time. Environmental injustice at the discursive level is clearly visible in cases of environmental racism, marginalization of traditional ecological knowledge, colonial conservation, etc. The significance of representation vis-à-vis environmental justice goals is evinced by its emphasis in postcolonial environmental legislations such as for example Bolivia’s Mother Earth Law, which emphasizes equity between human and non-human communities on Earth, and the Indian Forest Rights Act which grants rights to access, sustainably utilize and conserve forests to communities that depend on them. In their struggles for environmental justice, increasingly, Indigenous peoples are attempting interventions at the discursive level, questioning the legitimacy of the paradigms under which global environmental destruction has occurred and championing their lifestyles as alternatives to these.

This special issue aims to contribute to scholarship on the entanglement of representation with issues of environmental justice. How representations have enabled or constrained environmental justice is its central focus and from this many lines of enquiry may arise – for example: How is Indigenous knowledge represented in mainstream conservation science? How are forest-dependent communities constructed by governments in policies and policy implementation initiatives? To what extent are rural women’s concerns prioritized in environmental legislation? How does the media represent the environmental concerns of the poor in the Global South? How do discourses relating to inter-generational justice influence climate change mitigation efforts? All of these questions will be brought to bear on the central theme of the discursive roots of environmental justice/injustice.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400-600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the corresponding guest editor ([email protected]) or to the Genealogy editorial office ([email protected]). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the special issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review. Please note that for invited contributions there will be no article processing charge. Please submit your abstract by 31 August 2023.

Dr. Radhika Borde
Dr. Johanna Ennser-Kananen
Dr. Deniz Ortactepe Hart
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • environmental justice
  • representation
  • marginalization
  • empowerment
  • resistance
  • postcolonial critiques
  • equity
  • rights
  • traditional ecological knowledge
  • environmental movements/struggles

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

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18 pages, 4264 KiB  
Article
Adivasis as Ecological Warriors: Colonial Laws and Post-Colonial Adivasi Resistance in India’s Jharkhand
by Anjana Singh
Genealogy 2024, 8(4), 130; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8040130 - 11 Oct 2024
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Abstract
The growing divide between the capitalist mode of development promoted by the state and the participative development model suggested by the people has brought ecology, environment, and existence to the core of all contemporary debates. The Adivasi (indigenes) who constitute 8.6 percent of [...] Read more.
The growing divide between the capitalist mode of development promoted by the state and the participative development model suggested by the people has brought ecology, environment, and existence to the core of all contemporary debates. The Adivasi (indigenes) who constitute 8.6 percent of the entire population of India are engaged in a constant battle to save their ecology and landscape. Represented as communities whose existence is intertwined with ‘Jal, Jungle, Jameen’ (water, forest, and land), Adivasis are the most prominent communities facing dispossession and displacement from their roots to further the ideology of development in which they have no stake. The notion of Adivasis as ‘savage’, ‘primitive’, and ‘backward’ communities that are incompetent of ‘developing’ themselves, resulting in their ‘backwardness’ gets carried over from the colonial to the contemporary period. Exposed to the processes of mining and industrialisation, Adivasis and their ecological resources have been exploited since the colonial period to suit the development model of the state. The Adivasi notion of selfhood was overlooked in the process of making the areas inhabited by them zones of ‘exclusive governmentality’. The paper argues and analyses this transformation process of Adivasis into ecological warriors; a process in which they used their shared, remembered and lived past to assert their customary rights. Basing the study on three environmental movements of state of Jharkhand in Central India, namely the Koel-Karo movement of the 1980s, the Netarhat movement of the 1990s, and the Pathalgadi movement of 2017–18, the study underlines that the Adivasi of Jharkhand anchored on their customary rights as a weapon, to protect their ecology and landscape against various state-sponsored development schemes. Drawing on the methodology of field investigation, interaction with the NGOs, government reports and media reports, the article argues that these community struggles are rays of hope for a global ecological future. Full article
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12 pages, 248 KiB  
Review
Windigo Violence and Resistance
by Alfie Howard
Genealogy 2024, 8(2), 50; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8020050 - 30 Apr 2024
Viewed by 1672
Abstract
The windigo is a generally malicious figure in several Indigenous cultures of the land currently administered by the governments of the USA and Canada. In traditional narratives, the windigo is generally associated with hunger, greed, winter, and cannibalism. In this paper, I discuss [...] Read more.
The windigo is a generally malicious figure in several Indigenous cultures of the land currently administered by the governments of the USA and Canada. In traditional narratives, the windigo is generally associated with hunger, greed, winter, and cannibalism. In this paper, I discuss how both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers have used the figure of the windigo to critique and challenge environmental injustice. While some windigo stories present the being as a terrifying monster of the “wilderness”, others use the figure as an embodiment of environmental destruction and the injustice that comes with it. Windigo stories also highlight three further aspects of colonial violence: military violence, sexual violence, and religious violence. Although some stories depict windigos being defeated through violence, many stress the importance of care and healing to overcome the windigo affliction. In fact, storytelling itself may be part of the healing process. Windigo stories, I argue, can be a useful way to interrogate the injustices created by colonialism and environmental destruction, and the stories can also offer hope for healing and for an environmentally just future. Full article

Planned Papers

The below list represents only planned manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts have not been received by the Editorial Office yet. Papers submitted to MDPI journals are subject to peer-review.

Title: Climate change and women in Agriculture: Identifying the gap in policymaking
Author: Prakash
Highlights: investigate the ways in which women farmers articulate the impact of climate change on agriculture and rural life. Build an evidential base and narratives of exclusion from climate change response planning. Study how legal and policy perpetuate the status quo between men and women farmers

Title: Exploitation of ‘She’ and ‘Sherni’: Environmental Justice, Eco-Feminism and Marginalisation in film Sherni
Author: Singh
Highlights: Eco-Cinema, Eco-Feminism, Intersectionality, Patriarchy, Marginalisation

Title: Hong Kong’s No Third Runway Movement – An autoethnography of resisting tokenistic participation and empowering the environmental NGOs
Author: Mo
Highlights: a.The author's autoethnographic account of his role in leading the movement against Hong Kong Airport's third runway expansion. b.Using cost-benefit claims against the expansion, the author avoided the conservation-development dichotomy in the debate. c.The resistance switched the public sentiment from favouring the third runway to against it. It also empowered NGOs and communities to contribute to the resistance.

Title: Constructing agency in the climate crisis: A discursive analysis of enabling and constraining rhetoric in Finnish social studies textbooks
Author: Satokangas
Highlights: Tentative results: - The readers' possibilities to affect climate issues are limited to individual purchasing choices and recycling - Collective actions are omitted, as well as the political and economic interests and conflicts intertwined with the climate crisis - Textbooks, following their institutional role as mediators of consensus knowledge, represent a limited citizen agency focusing on consumption

Title: Navigating the Twists and Turns of Understanding Agency in Sustainability: Lessons From Books and Everyday Life
Author: Goshylyk
Highlights: Highlights are to come after

Title: Talking Nature: Tracking as traditional ecological knowledge - an endangered language and intangible cultural heritage for social and environmental justice
Author: Borde
Highlights: Traditional ecological knowledge; Decolonization; Epistemological Equity

Title: Windigo Violence and Resistance: Capitalism, Colonialism and Environmental Destruction in Contemporary Indigenous Narratives
Author: Howard
Highlights: • Indigenous writers have used windigo stories to explore their cultures’ experiences of colonialism, in both fiction and non-fiction • Indigenous narratives offer ways to defeat the windigo, often presenting nonviolent healing as an alternative to violent destruction • Windigo stories are a form of resistance to ongoing colonialism and environmental injustice

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