Michael Ekers
Biographic Data
| ID | 118852 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Ekers |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Ekers |
| SIGNATURE | EKERS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2859-873X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 596 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Crisis and Contestation in an Age of Extraction
The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
A Reserve Army of Timber
This article tells the story of how a massive belt of private forest land located on the eastern seaboard of Vancouver Island has functioned as a “reserve army” of timber that private capital has drawn on when they have found themselves increasingly constrained in their operations on Crown land. Crucially, this reserve army of trees was, and still is, constituted through a racialised regime of property ownership initiated by 19 th century land gr…
Land grabbing on the edge of empire
In 1873, on the edge of empire, over 800,000 hectares of land was reserved as payment for a future rail line on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. This land was granted to the Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway Company in 1887, sold to industrial capital in the twentieth century, and then finance capital in the twenty-first century. Intensive logging has been the constant. Indigenous nations have never relented in their opposition to the rail deal. Thi…
The coloniality of private forest lands
This paper examines how colonial land grants and the neoliberalization of forestry policy have enabled an aggressive harvesting regime on a massive tract of private land on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. We detail the intensity of industrial logging activities of three forestry companies—Island Timberlands, TimberWest, and Western Forest Products—on private land on Vancouver Island. We draw on 11 years of harvesting volume records from the p…
Ethnographies of Power
generations, classes, genders and societies.He introduces
On “the Concrete”
This paper develops a genealogy of concrete labour, paying particular attention to debates within marxist, feminist‐marxist and Black feminist writings. Our argument pivots around the dual character of (re)productive activities and an argument that the concrete is both an “aspect” of labour and the concentration of many different relations. We begin with a critique of the false universalisms in certain invocations of the concrete, noting how the …
On Articulation, Translation, and Populism
This article reviews Gillian Hart’s unique anticolonial Marxism, which she deftly deploys to explore questions regarding development, capitalism, and the post-apartheid trajectories of South Africa, focusing in particular on the articulations of race, class, gender, and nationalism therein. We argue that Hart’s careful engagement with Gramsci’s work enables her to be particularly attentive to both materiality and meaning in particular historical …
Financiers in the forests on Vancouver Island, British Columbia
Starting in the mid 2000s, a financial asset management company and institutional investors began to invest in timberlands in British Columbia, Canada's most western province. In a period of political economic crisis, investors looked to real assets-"dirt and trees" in the words of one research participant-as a means of accumulating capital through securing access to huge parcels of the most productive and valuable forestland in North America. Th…
The curious case of ecological farm interns
This article examines how farm interns, as a new group of non-waged agricultural workers, have come to support marginally or non-profitable agro-ecological farms in Ontario, Canada. Are farm interns potential agents of social change alongside farmers or are they being recruited onto farms because of the precarious economic situation of their agro-ecological farm hosts? I engage with this question through drawing on debates in agrarian studies arg…
The Socioecological Fix
This article, the second of two, argues that conceptualizing the socioecological fix involves understanding how fixed capital, as a produced production force, can transform the socioecological conditions and forces of production while also securing the hegemony of particular social hierarchies, power relations, and institutions. We stress that fixed capital is inherently political-ecological in its constitution and how it shapes socioecological p…
Food utopias
Food utopias, edited by Paul Stock, Michael Carolan and Christopher Rosin, is a book that challenged me to think differently about food and social change from how I generally approach these topics
The Metabolism of Socioecological Fixes
In this article, and the companion piece that follows, we develop an account of the socioecological fix. Our concern is to explore the ways in which crises of capitalist overaccumulation might be displaced through spatial fixes that result in the production of nature. We review Harvey's theory of the spatial fix, with emphasis on his model of capital switching, noting that the socioecological implications of the diversion of fixed capital into th…
Will work for food
Towards the socio-ecological fix
This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by SAGE
A fix in the forests
In the 1930s, the Canadian state sunk large sums of capital into forested landscapes in order to address a mounting and widespread unemployment crisis and the environmental legacy of industrial forestry practices. Unemployed men were enrolled into relief camps established at emerging Forest Experimentation Stations. These Stations reflected, and contributed to, a growing emphasis on reforestation and sustained-yield production. I argue that the u…
Labouring against the grain of progress
Gramsci and the Erotics of Labor
“A Barbed Gift of the Backwoods”
This chapter refers to Tim Nairn's essay “Antonu Su Gobbu” in his book Approaches to Gramsci. Nairn says of Antonio Gramsci that “He was a barbed gift of the backwoods to the metropolis, and some aspects of his originality always reflected this difference.” Together with John Berger's letter to Subcomandante Marcos about Gramsci's Sardinian birthplace, the mural of the young Gramsci's journey to a new political and intellectual life in the indust…
Gramsci
Pounding dirt all day’
This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis
The Gramscian Moment
Peter D. Thomas , The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism . Leiden : Brill , 2009 . ISBN 978 90 04 167711 ( cloth ). Antonio Gramsci has had something of a spectral presence in geography, often looming in the background of regulation theory and analyses of the local state. Recently, a decided turn to Gramsci can be witnessed in research on political ecology, globalization, philosophy and space. For anyone interested in Gramsci, Pet…
The Dirty Scruff”
In this article, I examine this nexus between the social and political meaning of unemployment and the political responses that follow. I focus on Depression‐era Vancouver and investigate the broad ideologies, representations and practices that contributed to the derision of the unemployed, which in turn, informed the establishment of rural relief camps that aimed to address the unemployment crisis of the 1930s. The social and political meaning o…
Governing Suburbia
Ekers M., Hamel P. and Keil R. Governing suburbia: modalities and mechanisms of suburban governance, Regional Studies . This paper traces the major modalities of suburban governance through a review of the extant literature on the matter. Based on the existing debate on suburban governance it appears that three modalities can be differentiated: the state, capital accumulation and private authoritarianism. A case is made for each and how they func…
Revitalizing the production of nature thesis
This paper revisits the central ontological claim in the production of nature thesis, Neil Smith’s proposition that labour is at the heart of the mutual co-production of nature and society. Surveying Smith’s work and others, we argue that there is a danger of losing the embodied, historically and geographically specific practices that are so central to the making of natures. Turning to the work of Antonio Gramsci, we find crucial resources that e…
Gramsci
The Power of Water
This paper develops an exchange between two important strands of research within contemporary human geography. One concerns the matter of socionatures; the other concerns the operation and establishment of power within liberal, capitalist social formations. Through mobilising some of the recent writings on the political ecology of water, we seek to show how an engagement with Gramscian and Foucauldian work on power could be mutually beneficial fo…
The Metabolism of Socioecological Fixes
In this article, and the companion piece that follows, we develop an account of the socioecological fix. Our concern is to explore the ways in which crises of capitalist overaccumulation might be displaced through spatial fixes that result in the production of nature. We review Harvey's theory of the spatial fix, with emphasis on his model of capital switching, noting that the socioecological implications of the diversion of fixed capital into th…
The Socioecological Fix
This article, the second of two, argues that conceptualizing the socioecological fix involves understanding how fixed capital, as a produced production force, can transform the socioecological conditions and forces of production while also securing the hegemony of particular social hierarchies, power relations, and institutions. We stress that fixed capital is inherently political-ecological in its constitution and how it shapes socioecological p…
Governing Suburbia
Ekers M., Hamel P. and Keil R. Governing suburbia: modalities and mechanisms of suburban governance, Regional Studies . This paper traces the major modalities of suburban governance through a review of the extant literature on the matter. Based on the existing debate on suburban governance it appears that three modalities can be differentiated: the state, capital accumulation and private authoritarianism. A case is made for each and how they func…
Towards the socio-ecological fix
This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by SAGE
Gramsci Lives
Revitalizing the production of nature thesis
This paper revisits the central ontological claim in the production of nature thesis, Neil Smith’s proposition that labour is at the heart of the mutual co-production of nature and society. Surveying Smith’s work and others, we argue that there is a danger of losing the embodied, historically and geographically specific practices that are so central to the making of natures. Turning to the work of Antonio Gramsci, we find crucial resources that e…
The political ecology of hegemony in depression-era British Columbia, Canada
On Articulation, Translation, and Populism
This article reviews Gillian Hart’s unique anticolonial Marxism, which she deftly deploys to explore questions regarding development, capitalism, and the post-apartheid trajectories of South Africa, focusing in particular on the articulations of race, class, gender, and nationalism therein. We argue that Hart’s careful engagement with Gramsci’s work enables her to be particularly attentive to both materiality and meaning in particular historical …
A fix in the forests
In the 1930s, the Canadian state sunk large sums of capital into forested landscapes in order to address a mounting and widespread unemployment crisis and the environmental legacy of industrial forestry practices. Unemployed men were enrolled into relief camps established at emerging Forest Experimentation Stations. These Stations reflected, and contributed to, a growing emphasis on reforestation and sustained-yield production. I argue that the u…
Will work for food
Gramsci
The curious case of ecological farm interns
This article examines how farm interns, as a new group of non-waged agricultural workers, have come to support marginally or non-profitable agro-ecological farms in Ontario, Canada. Are farm interns potential agents of social change alongside farmers or are they being recruited onto farms because of the precarious economic situation of their agro-ecological farm hosts? I engage with this question through drawing on debates in agrarian studies arg…
Financiers in the forests on Vancouver Island, British Columbia
Starting in the mid 2000s, a financial asset management company and institutional investors began to invest in timberlands in British Columbia, Canada's most western province. In a period of political economic crisis, investors looked to real assets-"dirt and trees" in the words of one research participant-as a means of accumulating capital through securing access to huge parcels of the most productive and valuable forestland in North America. Th…
On “the Concrete”
This paper develops a genealogy of concrete labour, paying particular attention to debates within marxist, feminist‐marxist and Black feminist writings. Our argument pivots around the dual character of (re)productive activities and an argument that the concrete is both an “aspect” of labour and the concentration of many different relations. We begin with a critique of the false universalisms in certain invocations of the concrete, noting how the …
The coloniality of private forest lands
This paper examines how colonial land grants and the neoliberalization of forestry policy have enabled an aggressive harvesting regime on a massive tract of private land on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. We detail the intensity of industrial logging activities of three forestry companies—Island Timberlands, TimberWest, and Western Forest Products—on private land on Vancouver Island. We draw on 11 years of harvesting volume records from the p…
Land grabbing on the edge of empire
In 1873, on the edge of empire, over 800,000 hectares of land was reserved as payment for a future rail line on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. This land was granted to the Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway Company in 1887, sold to industrial capital in the twentieth century, and then finance capital in the twenty-first century. Intensive logging has been the constant. Indigenous nations have never relented in their opposition to the rail deal. Thi…
Planting the Nation
Planting trees under a piece-rate wage scheme is widely recognized in Canada as a veritable national “rite of passage” for young,White, middle-class university students and travelers. Canadian artists Sarah Ann Johnson, Lorraine Gilbert, and Althea Thauberger have received popular and critical acclaim for their artistic representations of the “tree planting experience” in Canada. In this article, the authors critically examine tree planting art—a…
Labouring against the grain of progress
Pounding dirt all day’
This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis
The Dirty Scruff”
In this article, I examine this nexus between the social and political meaning of unemployment and the political responses that follow. I focus on Depression‐era Vancouver and investigate the broad ideologies, representations and practices that contributed to the derision of the unemployed, which in turn, informed the establishment of rural relief camps that aimed to address the unemployment crisis of the 1930s. The social and political meaning o…
A Reserve Army of Timber
This article tells the story of how a massive belt of private forest land located on the eastern seaboard of Vancouver Island has functioned as a “reserve army” of timber that private capital has drawn on when they have found themselves increasingly constrained in their operations on Crown land. Crucially, this reserve army of trees was, and still is, constituted through a racialised regime of property ownership initiated by 19 th century land gr…
Food utopias
Food utopias, edited by Paul Stock, Michael Carolan and Christopher Rosin, is a book that challenged me to think differently about food and social change from how I generally approach these topics
The political ecology of hegemony in depression-era British Columbia, Canada
The Power of Water
This paper develops an exchange between two important strands of research within contemporary human geography. One concerns the matter of socionatures; the other concerns the operation and establishment of power within liberal, capitalist social formations. Through mobilising some of the recent writings on the political ecology of water, we seek to show how an engagement with Gramscian and Foucauldian work on power could be mutually beneficial fo…
Gramsci Lives
Planting the Nation
Planting trees under a piece-rate wage scheme is widely recognized in Canada as a veritable national “rite of passage” for young,White, middle-class university students and travelers. Canadian artists Sarah Ann Johnson, Lorraine Gilbert, and Althea Thauberger have received popular and critical acclaim for their artistic representations of the “tree planting experience” in Canada. In this article, the authors critically examine tree planting art—a…
Gramsci and the Erotics of Labor
“A Barbed Gift of the Backwoods”
This chapter refers to Tim Nairn's essay “Antonu Su Gobbu” in his book Approaches to Gramsci. Nairn says of Antonio Gramsci that “He was a barbed gift of the backwoods to the metropolis, and some aspects of his originality always reflected this difference.” Together with John Berger's letter to Subcomandante Marcos about Gramsci's Sardinian birthplace, the mural of the young Gramsci's journey to a new political and intellectual life in the indust…
Gramsci
Pounding dirt all day’
This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis
The Gramscian Moment
Peter D. Thomas , The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism . Leiden : Brill , 2009 . ISBN 978 90 04 167711 ( cloth ). Antonio Gramsci has had something of a spectral presence in geography, often looming in the background of regulation theory and analyses of the local state. Recently, a decided turn to Gramsci can be witnessed in research on political ecology, globalization, philosophy and space. For anyone interested in Gramsci, Pet…
The Dirty Scruff”
In this article, I examine this nexus between the social and political meaning of unemployment and the political responses that follow. I focus on Depression‐era Vancouver and investigate the broad ideologies, representations and practices that contributed to the derision of the unemployed, which in turn, informed the establishment of rural relief camps that aimed to address the unemployment crisis of the 1930s. The social and political meaning o…
Governing Suburbia
Ekers M., Hamel P. and Keil R. Governing suburbia: modalities and mechanisms of suburban governance, Regional Studies . This paper traces the major modalities of suburban governance through a review of the extant literature on the matter. Based on the existing debate on suburban governance it appears that three modalities can be differentiated: the state, capital accumulation and private authoritarianism. A case is made for each and how they func…
Revitalizing the production of nature thesis
This paper revisits the central ontological claim in the production of nature thesis, Neil Smith’s proposition that labour is at the heart of the mutual co-production of nature and society. Surveying Smith’s work and others, we argue that there is a danger of losing the embodied, historically and geographically specific practices that are so central to the making of natures. Turning to the work of Antonio Gramsci, we find crucial resources that e…
Gramsci
Labouring against the grain of progress
Will work for food
Towards the socio-ecological fix
This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by SAGE
A fix in the forests
In the 1930s, the Canadian state sunk large sums of capital into forested landscapes in order to address a mounting and widespread unemployment crisis and the environmental legacy of industrial forestry practices. Unemployed men were enrolled into relief camps established at emerging Forest Experimentation Stations. These Stations reflected, and contributed to, a growing emphasis on reforestation and sustained-yield production. I argue that the u…
Food utopias
Food utopias, edited by Paul Stock, Michael Carolan and Christopher Rosin, is a book that challenged me to think differently about food and social change from how I generally approach these topics
The Metabolism of Socioecological Fixes
In this article, and the companion piece that follows, we develop an account of the socioecological fix. Our concern is to explore the ways in which crises of capitalist overaccumulation might be displaced through spatial fixes that result in the production of nature. We review Harvey's theory of the spatial fix, with emphasis on his model of capital switching, noting that the socioecological implications of the diversion of fixed capital into th…
The Socioecological Fix
This article, the second of two, argues that conceptualizing the socioecological fix involves understanding how fixed capital, as a produced production force, can transform the socioecological conditions and forces of production while also securing the hegemony of particular social hierarchies, power relations, and institutions. We stress that fixed capital is inherently political-ecological in its constitution and how it shapes socioecological p…
Financiers in the forests on Vancouver Island, British Columbia
Starting in the mid 2000s, a financial asset management company and institutional investors began to invest in timberlands in British Columbia, Canada's most western province. In a period of political economic crisis, investors looked to real assets-"dirt and trees" in the words of one research participant-as a means of accumulating capital through securing access to huge parcels of the most productive and valuable forestland in North America. Th…
The curious case of ecological farm interns
This article examines how farm interns, as a new group of non-waged agricultural workers, have come to support marginally or non-profitable agro-ecological farms in Ontario, Canada. Are farm interns potential agents of social change alongside farmers or are they being recruited onto farms because of the precarious economic situation of their agro-ecological farm hosts? I engage with this question through drawing on debates in agrarian studies arg…
On “the Concrete”
This paper develops a genealogy of concrete labour, paying particular attention to debates within marxist, feminist‐marxist and Black feminist writings. Our argument pivots around the dual character of (re)productive activities and an argument that the concrete is both an “aspect” of labour and the concentration of many different relations. We begin with a critique of the false universalisms in certain invocations of the concrete, noting how the …
On Articulation, Translation, and Populism
This article reviews Gillian Hart’s unique anticolonial Marxism, which she deftly deploys to explore questions regarding development, capitalism, and the post-apartheid trajectories of South Africa, focusing in particular on the articulations of race, class, gender, and nationalism therein. We argue that Hart’s careful engagement with Gramsci’s work enables her to be particularly attentive to both materiality and meaning in particular historical …
The coloniality of private forest lands
This paper examines how colonial land grants and the neoliberalization of forestry policy have enabled an aggressive harvesting regime on a massive tract of private land on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. We detail the intensity of industrial logging activities of three forestry companies—Island Timberlands, TimberWest, and Western Forest Products—on private land on Vancouver Island. We draw on 11 years of harvesting volume records from the p…
Political science (21 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Politics (17 works) · Law (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · Geography (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (11 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (9 works)