Introduction to Political Ecology (2026/2027: Periode 1)

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Cursusdoel

Specific learning outcomes
By the end of this course, successful students will be able to:
  1. Understand why history (e.g. of colonialism, capitalism, socialism, market-driven reform) matters so much in our understanding of and actions to address contemporary environmental problems
  2. Recognize and describe critical social theories (e.g. Marxian, Foucaultian, postcolonial, critical race theory, and feminist), in political ecology and environmental justice scholarship.
  3. Critically analyze debates around major global environmental issues as learned through paradigmatic case studies from around the world.
  4. Independently articulate arguments relating to the course’s content in written form. Develop “critical thinking” and “oral and writing skills”.

Vakinhoudelijk

WEEKLY SCHEDULE OF READINGS
Each set of readings and each weekly reading report must be completed before the date indicated below. Please note that I have deliberately placed readings in a particular order so as to maximize logic and learning. “Further readings” are optional and are meant as deeper dives into the theme at hand. Note: for links, you might have to copy and paste the link into your browser. All links were current as of April 12, 2017.
September 4- Course Introduction: Political and Apolitical ecologies

HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS
September 7- The Industrial Working Class and the Origins of Political Ecology
This and the following interactive lecture will provide a broad historical sweep of the evolution of urban environments in the west and the people who produced them. In the mid-1800s, Karl Marx and his friend Frederick Engels wrote a good deal about the working class in Europe’s bourgeoning industrial cities. We learn from them how the “capitalist mode of production” sought to extract “surplus value” (profit) from labor power, only to leave those same laborers with low wages and without decent housing and sanitation.
Marxist theories were used to understand how modern cities were made through the harnessing of “nature” (food, fuel, water, raw materials, etc.) by human labor, a process Marx called “metabolism”. Political ecology draws on these historical observations to study urban poverty, natural resource exploitation, and inequality.
Robbins, Paul. (2019). “The critical tools” and “Political ecology emerges” . (Chapters 3-4). in Political ecology: a critical introduction. Third edition. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.
Heynen, N., M. Kaika and E. Swyngedouw. (2006). “Urban political ecology: Politicizing the production of urban natures” in N. Heynen, M. Kaika & E. Swyngedouw (eds). In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. New York: Routledge.
Audio-visual:
Jason Moore. “Nature, Capitalism, Crisis.” Against the Grain. Podcast.
September 11- The Colonial Enterprise: Segregation, Discourse, and Health
In this interactive lecture, we turn to the colonial enterprise. Much of what we observe in the Global South today can be traced to processes of capitalist urbanization, as well as enduring legacies of the colonial encounter. Here, Orientalist knowledge and discursive frameworks aimed at controlling the native “other” become particularly important. In this lecture, we move beyond Marxian explanations and turn to the role of discourse, knowledge, and subjectification in shaping environments as read through postcolonial and critical race theory.

Hall, S. (1993). “The West and The Rest: Discourse and Power” in B Glieben and S Hall (Eds), The Formations of Modernity: Understanding Modern Societies: an Introduction. Cambridge: Polity
Press.

Kooy, M. and K Bakker. (2008). “Technologies of Government: Constituting Subjectivities, Spaces, and Infrastructures in Colonial and Contemporary Jakarta”. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32 (2): 375-391.

Audio-visual:
Panko, B. “The Supposedly Pristine, Untouched Amazon Rainforest Was Actually Shaped By Humans.” Smithsonian Magazine. March 13, 2017.
  • Optional: Swanson, M. (1977). “The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony”, 1900-1909. The Journal of African History, 18 (3): 387-410.
September 14- Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice
The rise of environmental justice as an activist movement and, subsequently, as a field of policy and scholarly analysis, was contemporaneous with the latter years of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. In South Africa, environmental justice became an important language of urban activist struggles during the latter years of apartheid rule. Over the last three decades environmental justice has become a rallying cry for communities and social movements across the world struggling to protect their environment and ways of life against the appropriation, transformation and dispossession of nature. This interactive lecture will discuss EJ as multivalent, “nourished by a radical plurality of justice claims”, from its origins to its more recent engagements with decolonial theory.
Holifield, R. (2015) Environmental justice. In, Perreault, Tom, Gavin Bridge, and James McCarthy, (eds.), The Routledge handbook of political ecology, pp. 19-50. New York: Routledge.
Álvarez, L & B. Coolsaet (2020) Decolonizing Environmental Justice Studies: A Latin American Perspective, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 31:2, 50-69

Audio-visual:
Spike Lee. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Act 1)
  • Optional: Ranganathan, M. 2016. “Thinking with Flint: Racial Liberalism and the Roots of an American Water Tragedy”. Capitalism Nature Socialism 27 (3): 17-33.
  • Pulido, L. 2017. “Geographies of race and ethnicity 2: Environmental racism, racial capitalism and state-sanctioned violence”. Progress in Human Geography 41 (4) 524-533.

September 18 - Virtual Exchange and Groupwork: Urban Political Ecologies in the Netherlands and Colombia
September 21- Feminist political ecologies
Scholarship has questioned Political Ecology’s exclusive attention in class and made calls for a situated political ecology, examining power as “diffused and relational”, focusing on everyday practices and exploring power relations based on gender and intersectionality. This interactive lecture delves on Feminist Political Ecology, an interdisciplinary subfield of political ecology and feminism that puts gender at the center of nature-power relations.

Ojeda, D., et al. (2022). Feminist Ecologies. Annual Review of Environment and Resources. 047:149–71

Carney, Judith. (1993). Converting the wetlands, engendering the environment: the intersection of gender with agrarian change in The Gambia. Economic Geography 69(4): 329-348.

Audio-visual:
“How Hard is Your Hat?”: Exploring Gendered Professional Cultures in Dutch Water Engineering https://flows.hypotheses.org/1112
  • Optional: Harcourt, Wendy, Sacha Knox and Tara Tabassi. 2015. World-wise otherwise stories for our endtimes: conversations on queer ecologies. In Practicing feminist political ecologies: moving beyond the ‘green economy,’ edited by Wendy Harcourt and Ingrid L. Nelson, 286-308. London: Zed Books.
CONTEMPORARY GOVERNANCE CHALLENGES
September 25 - The “Sustainable City” against/in Late Capitalism
In our present moment of climate change, coupled with the realization that urban regions concentrate enormous environmental and climate risks, inequalities, and opportunities, it would appear that all eyes are on “the urban”. In this interactive lecture, we consider the place of cities in recent policy conversations, with its increasing emphasis on making cities “green” and “sustainable.

Westman L & Castán Broto V (2022) Urban transformations to keep all the same : the power of ivy discourses. Antipode.

Pow, CP and H Neo. (2013). “Seeing Red Over Green: Contesting Urban Sustainabilities in China”, Urban Studies 50 (11): 2256-2274.

Audio-visual:
There’s a mega climate problem with our megacities, https://www.aljazeera.com/program/all-hail/2022/12/15/theres-a-mega-climate-problem-with-our-megacities-all-hail
  • Optional: Wachsmuth, D, DA Cohen, and H Angelo. 2016. “Expand the Frontiers of Urban Sustainability”, Nature, 23 August. http://www.nature.com/news/expand-the-frontiers-of-urbansustainability-1.20459

September 25, September 28 and October 2- Virtual Exchange and Groupwork: Urban Political Ecologies in the Netherlands and Colombia

October 9 - Climate Change Risk and Adptation
In this interactive lecture we explore how political ecology has analyzed the geographical causes of climate change, including the differential responsibilities of countries for fossil fuel consumption and land use change. We will delve on responses to climate change and on how political ecology can be used to analyze mitigation – through energy policy and carbon offsets for example – and adaptation.
Bulkeley, H. and P. Newell (2010) Governing Climate Change. Routledge: New York. Chapters 1 and 2.
Paprocki, K. (2022) On viability: Climate change and the science of possible futures. Global Environmental Change 73 (102487)
Audio-visual:
Greta Thunberg full speech at UN Climate Change COP25 - Climate Emergency Event.
Klein, Naomi. 2016. “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World.” June 2.
Optional: Eriksen. S.H., Nightingale, A.J., and Eakin, H. (2015). Reframing adaptation: the political nature of climate change adaptation. Global Environmental Change 35: 523-533.

October 12 - Climate Coloniality
The uneven impacts of climate change mean that differently-located people experience, respond to, and cope with the climate crisis and related vulnerabilities in radically different ways. In this round-table we will discuss how the coloniality of climate change operates through global racial capitalism, colonial dispossessions, and climate debts. We will discuss how to decolonize climate we need to address the complexities of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, international development, and geopolitics that contribute to the reproduction of ongoing “colonialities”.
Ghosh, A. (2021) The Nutmeg’s Curse. Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Selected chapters.
Ferdinand, M, (2022) Decolonial ecologies: beyond environmentalism. In: Pellizoni et al., Handbook of Critical Environmental Politics. ElgarOnline.
Audio-visual:
Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi O. 2020. “Climate Apartheid Is the Coming Police Violence Crisis.” Dissent.
Global Climate Justice against Neo-Colonialism: New Concepts and Priorities for Just Cooperation, Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2
  • Optional: Sultana, F. (2022). The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality. Political Geography, 102638.

October 16 - The Political Ecology of Disease: Focus on Dengue
This is a gateway lecture that bridges two central themes in current affairs: environmental sustainability and global health. While these two topics merit individual study, policy-makers and researchers are increasingly bringing them into conversation. Many global health problems—from chronic conditions to global epidemics such as dengue—are related to human-environment relationships and political ecologies.

Mitchell, T. (2002) "Can the Mosquito Speak?". Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 19-53.

Acevedo-Guerrero, T. (2022) Water with larvae: Hydrological fertility, inequality, and mosquito urbanism. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. 0(0).

Audio-visual:
The Forgotten Virus: Zika Families and Researchers Struggle for Support, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/16/health/zika-children-research.html
  • Optional: Nading, A. (2015). “Chimeric Globalism: Global Health in the Shadow of the Dengue Vaccine,” American Ethnologist 42(2): 356-370.

INFRASTRUCTURAL AND RESOURCE POLITICS
October 19- Water Politics
In this interactive lecture, we will look at work that is increasingly looking at water poverty and failing technology and infrastructure in the global North, and move on to contemporary debates on urban water privatization. Of particular interest to scholars and policy analysts have been the implications of water privatization and market-based reform on access and sustainability, as well as the forms of political struggle that take root at sites of water policy change.

Swyngedouw, E. (2009). “The Political Economy and Political Ecology of the Hydro-Social Cycle”.
Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education, (142): 56-60.

Ahmed, B. (2016). 'They’re Not Going to Be Able to Ignore This Entire City Standing Together', Atlantic City Lab 30 December: http://www.citylab.com/politics/2016/12/theyre-not-going-to-be-able-toignore-this-entire-city-standing-together/511883/
Rusca, M., Savelli, E., Di Baldassarre, G. et al. (2023). Unprecedented droughts are expected to exacerbate urban inequalities in Southern Africa. Nat. Clim. Chang. 13, 98–105
Audio-visual:
Why Focus On Water Storage? https://www.spotlightnepal.com/2023/01/23/why-focus-water-storage/
  • Optional: Truelove, Y. 2011. “(Re-)Conceptualizing water inequality in Delhi, India through a feminist political ecology framework”. Geoforum 32: 143-152.
October 23- Landscapes of Extraction
In this interactive lecture we discuss a new frontier of environmental degradation: the mining of critical minerals. While climate advocates rightfully focus on dramatically reducing emissions by keeping oil, coal, and gas in the ground, corporations and governments around the world are eying the resources that need to come out of the ground for renewable energy systems to function. We’ll read two pieces—one Intro piece by Thea Riofrancos and one in-depth study by anthropologists Cristóbal Bonelli and Cristina Doador. Cristóbal will also be a guest lecturer in the class.
Riofrancos, Thea. (2022). “Shifting Mining From the Global South Misses the Point of Climate Justice.” Foreign Policy. February 7 / Riofrancos, Thea et al. 2023. “Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining.” Climate and Community Project.
Bonelli, Cristóbal, and Cristina Dorador. (2021). “Endangered Salares: Micro-Disasters in Northern Chile.” Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society 4 (1): 1-29. https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2021.1968634
Audio-visual:
Moore, Jason. ‘Amsterdam is Standing on Norway’ Part I: The Alchemy of Capital, Empire and Nature in the Diaspora of Silver, 1545–1648.’ Journal of Agrarian Change, (10)1, 33-68.
Sam Cowie. 2019. How crime drives deforestation in Brazil's Amazon. Financial Times.
  • Optional: Vela-Almeida, D. (2020). Seeing like the people: a history of territory and resistance in the southern Ecuadorian Amazon. Journal of Political Ecology. 27.

October 26- Agriculture and the Food System
In this interactive lecture we turn to agriculture, one of the most visible areas of environmental policy-making and activist struggle. McMichael gives a historical and political-economic overview of the food “crisis”, while guest lecturers Stefanie Lutz and Hans Kromhout give us some insight on the sustainability of agribusinesses from an environmental justice perspective, with a special focus on gender relations, occupational health and water.

McMichael, P. (2009). The World Food Crisis in Historical Perspective, Monthly Review 61 (3). https://monthlyreview.org/2009/07/01/the-world-food-crisis-in-historicalperspective/

Wener, M. et al. (2022) The Glyphosate Assemblage: Herbicides, Uneven Development, and Chemical Geographies of Ubiquity. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 112(1), pp. 19–35

Audio-visual:
Raj Patel On Chicken Nuggets And Capitalism. Now This.
Optional: Fitting, E. (2017). Genetically Modified Crops and the Remaking of Latin America’s Food Landscape. Food and Place: A Critical Exploration, 52.

October 30- Final class
Wrap-up Discussion – No readings due. Come prepared to discuss your favorite quotes, theories, and concepts from the readings and any last-minute questions about the final exam.

Werkvormen

Lectures

Tutorials

Toetsing

Eindresultaat

Verplicht | Weging 1% | ECTS 7,5

Ingangseisen en voorkennis

Ingangseisen

Je moet inschreven staan voor de volgende opleiding:

  • Sustainable Development

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Voertalen

  • Engels

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Aanbevolen materiaal

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    For course materials, check the course description.

Coördinator

dr. T. Acevedo Guerrero t.acevedoguerrero@uu.nl

Docenten

Inschrijving

Let op: deze cursus is niet toegankelijk voor studenten van andere faculteiten, bijvakkers mogen zich dus niet inschrijven.

Inschrijving
Van maandag 8 juni 2026 tot en met vrijdag 26 juni 2026

Na-inschrijving
Van maandag 17 augustus 2026 tot en met dinsdag 18 augustus 2026

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