Political Ecology and Environmental Sociology: Towards Productive Engagement or Sustaining the Contract of Mutual Indifference?

DIMENSIONS OF POLITICAL ECOLOGY, CONFERENCE ON NATURE/SOCIETY AT THE
UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY February 27 – March 1, 2014 University of
Kentucky Lexington, Kentucky, USA

Alan Rudy, Damian White, Christopher Oliver and Brian Gareau

The political ecologist Piers Blackie has observed in a stock-taking
of political ecology that “a review of Environmental Sociology, a
textbook by Hannigan, finds no mention of Political Ecology and yet
most of its contents might well be claimed as Political Ecology”
(Blackie, 2008: 772). One could similarly work through many political
ecology textbooks and find little or no discussion of environmental
sociology. Given the ritualistic appeals to “inter-disciplinarity” in
the environmental social sciences, how can we account for the
extra-ordinary disengagement between political ecology and
environmental sociology? How can these seemingly overlapping and
aligned sub-disciplines largely ignore each other? Why has political
ecology taken socio-natural hybridity, post-human ethics and
non-equilibrium ecologies so much more seriously than US environmental
sociology has? Why is it that understandings of the relationship
between capital and ecology are widely divergent between environmental
sociologists and political ecologists? Are both fields increasingly
disabled by their dis-engagement with each other?

Attempting to do justice to the diverse amalgam of movements,
institutions and disciplines that have contributed to the many methods
and foci involved, this panel will explore this strange contract of
mutual indifference from a number of perspectives, e.g.

1.    Northern attitude and policy research relative to Southern
development and ethnographic studies;

2.    Durkheimian empiricist, realist Marxist and neo-Malthusian
approaches contrasted with relational Marxist, materialist feminist
and post structuralist currents;

3.    critical takes on risk society and the democratization of the
state versus bureaucratic management derived from risk science-based
policy;

4.     local and lay knowledge leading in directions quite different
than those of green neoliberalism;

5.   the primary roots of US environmental sociology in rural
sociology versus political ecology’s founding of political ecology in
European development geography.

The panel will consist of a series of short pieces (3000 words) en
route to an open discussion. The aims of the panel will be to gain
great understanding of the blockages that prevent broader engagements
between political ecology and environmental sociology. It will also
consider how we might imagine more productive relations between
political ecology and environmental sociology.

Alan Rudy [email protected] Damian White [email protected]
2013, Chris Oliver [email protected] and Brian Gareau
[email protected]