Laura Zanotti
Biographic Data
| ID | 119367 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laura Zanotti |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laura |
| FAMILY NAME | Zanotti |
| SIGNATURE | ZANOTTI L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Purdue University West Lafayette |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2712-4284 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 58 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 248 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 58 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Challenging the Cosmocracy of Certainty and Engaging the AI Hyperpharmakon: Regulation, Ethics, and Resonance
This paper critically explores the ontological underpinning of AI, situating it within the broader quest for certainty that characterizes the Western onto-political imaginary. We argue that AI is a technology of certainty, which is moored in the fragmentation and standardization of language that started with the invention of the Greek alphabet. We question conceptualizations of AI as a “thing” and reconceptualize it as a paradoxical hyperobject (…
The unexpected role of conditionality in shaping relational values: Evidence from a Bolivian incentive-based conservation program
As global change accelerates, Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs have become increasingly important tools for addressing the interconnected challenges of land degradation, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, and climate change. PES programs provide incentives to individuals or communities, conditional on people adopting sustainable natural resource management practices to support or increase ecosystem service provisioning. Although con…
Theorizing Access in Global Environmental Governance: A Critical Analysis of COP26 and the Covid-19 Pandemic
Sites of global environmental governance (GEG), like the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties (UNFCCC COP), are critical spaces where state and nonstate actors grapple with our planet’s most pressing challenges. Failure to address the unequal impacts of the climate crisis has led scholars and decision makers to call for more transparent, inclusive, and accountable decision-making processes. However, the ever-increasing …
Making Mẽbêngôkre-Kayapó Movies: Governance, Conviviality, and Productive Frictions
Mẽbêngôkre-Kayapó communities are embedded within complex social networks, norms of conviviality, and governance structures that impact the way they make films and pursue filmmaking careers. This article examines the complex productive frictions that emerged while building an Indigenous film collective and multi-camera team. Filmmakers organize and manage the collective within both customary and new forms of governance, which fortify social relat…
Decolonization/Decoloniality, Entangled Ontologies: Old Debates and New Directions
This article introduces a special issue of Community Change focused on Decolonization/Decoloniality and Entangled Ontologies. The guest editors provide a summary of each article and context for the pieces’ development from a PhD seminar at Virginia Tech in Fall 2022 titled “Decolonization/Decoloniality/Entangled Ontologies.”
Cosmologies, coloniality and quantum critique: Exploring conversations with Native American ways of knowing
Worldviews provide orientation in the world. They also have worlding power as part of material assemblages within which our responses to political issues are devised. This article turns the gaze inward to “decenter” Western ways of knowing, cosmologies, and stories of the origins of the universe. It questions considering science as a way of knowing completely separated from religious and political thinking and highlights how Western theories of m…
The relationship between household structures and everyday adaptation and livelihood strategies in northwestern Pakistan
The interactions between household size, capital, and adaptation to social-ecological change has been widely studied; however, little is known about the differences in everyday adaptation to social-ecological change across household structures. Joint family households are increasing in contexts where the nuclear family had previously been the norm, and remains a prevalent structure throughout the world. Thus, it is important to understand how the…
Centering Community Voices in Mining Governance
Peru has shifted away from centralized mining management to governance among government, companies, and communities. Various mechanisms facilitate community participation, including the mining canon, dialogues, and corporate social responsibility programs. Even with these laws and mechanisms, mining pollution and conflicts continue. In this study, we ask: how do communities perceive and participate in mining governance? And what are some alternat…
Linking migration to community resilience in the receiving basin of a large-scale water transfer project
Large-scale water transfer projects (LWTPs) transfer water to urban and agricultural areas. The Majes-Siguas canal, established in 1983, is an LWTP that created a thriving agricultural area through irrigating the Majes district in the Atacama Desert of Peru. Like other LWTP receiving basins, the project has attracted an influx of migrants who work on the farms. At the same time, the Majes LWTP is the district’s only source of water and has an agi…
Ethics in a Quantum World
This forum invites a reflection on how we may understand ethics in global studies in light of the growing debate on thinking through quantum for the social sciences and humanities more broadly. Quantum principles such as entanglement and indeterminism challenge the notions of individuality and subjectivity and the validity of universal principles as sufficient guidelines for agency, all notions that constitute the foundations of modern deontologi…
Just Recognition and Biocultural Rights
Outsourcing governance in Peru’s integrated water resources management
Participatory water governance has become highly influential around the world as a means for managing water resources. Scholars and practitioners advocate for the inclusion of previously marginalized communities in water resources management through the devolution of power, responsibility, and participation. Where community institutions are weak or missing, experts recommend strengthening or re-building them to enable inclusive decision-making ov…
Navigating the spaces between human rights and justice: Cultivating Indigenous representation in global environmental governance
How and in what ways do 'marginalized' actors influence global environmental governance? Through a collaborative event ethnography of the Paris Climate Summit (COP21), we examine power as it emerges through interactions between actors, institutions, and spaces, focusing on Indigenous Peoples' engagement at the international treaty negotiations. The findings show how Indigenous Peoples generate new meanings and avenues for their pursuits of justic…
Club-Fighters of the Amazon: Warfare among the Kayapó Indians of Central Brazil by Gustaaf Verswijver
How do Indigenous and local knowledge systems respond to climate change
Popovici, R., A. G. de L. Moraes, Z. Ma, L. Zanotti, K. A. Cherkauer, A. E. Erwin, K. E. Mazer, E. F. Bocardo Delgado, J. P. Pinto Cáceres, P. Ranjan, and L. S. Prokopy. 2021. How do Indigenous and local knowledge systems respond to climate change? Ecology and Society 26(3):27. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-12481-260327
Media Sovereignty and Digital Activism: Transdisciplinary Service-learning with Indigenous Peoples in the Brazilian Amazon
This article describes and analyses a collaborative project that combines service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) objectives and goals with anthropological commitments to support an Indigenous filmmaking collective media centre in one Mẽbêngôkre-Kayapó community, Brazil. We adapted curricular designs already in place in SLCE semester-long or summer abroad programs to incorporate decolonizing methodologies and symmetrical anthropological …
De-colonizing the political ontology of Kantian ethics: A quantum perspective
This article explores the relevance of ontological assumptions for justifications of agency and ethics. It critiques Kantian ethics for being based upon an ontological imaginary that starts from the substantialism of Newtonian physics. Substantialism shapes Western political philosophy’s view about who we are as subjects and how the world works. In this ontological imaginary, validation of ethics is based upon universality and abstractions. Furth…
A Response to the Millennium Forum
In my response to the contributors to this forum on Ontological Entanglements I take a few steps down the crossroads they have explored. I reflect on the critiques they moved, on the generative potential of quantum ontological research they highlighted and sketch possible avenues for future inquiry. First, I clarify the position of Ontological Entanglements vis a vis feminist and queer theories. While my work deeply relies on this literature, its…
Intersectionality shapes adaptation to social-ecological change
People from across the Caylloma Province of Peru are adapting to social-ecological changes, such as decreasing water supplies and rapidly retreating glaciers, in different and unequal ways. In this study, we show how this inequality is intersectional; identities like gender and age compound and interact with systems of power to shape how people adapt to these changes at the individual, household, and district scales. We draw from 130 semi-structu…
Doing feminist collaborative event ethnography
Feminist political ecologists have transformed mainstream political ecology since its inception. The foundational and current work of feminist political ecologists indicate that their field is attentive to the epistemological foundations of power, inequities, and inequalities that cut across intersectional identities and hierarchies of difference and at the sites of environmental conflict and governance. Feminist political ecologists have made im…
Political ecology and decolonial research: Co-production with the Iñupiat in Utqiaġvik
Environmental social science research designs have shifted over the past several decades to include an increased commitment to multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary team-based work that have had dual but complementary foci. These address power and equity in the substantive aspects of research, and also to adopt more engaged forms of practice, including decolonial approaches. The fields of political ecology, human geography, and environmental anth…
Large intact forest landscapes and inclusive conservation: A Political Ecological Perspective
Intact Forest Landscapes (IFLs) are global conservation units that aim to combat fragmentation, alteration, degradation, and loss of global forests. ILFs are typically recognized for their biodiversity, carbon storage, protection of hydroecological systems and other ecosystem services. However, IFLs are distinctive among other conservation efforts because they do not immediately prioritize conservation approaches that have goals of alleviating hu…
Sustainability, resilience, adaptation, and transformation: Tensions and Plural Approaches
Zanotti, L., Z. Ma, J. L. Johnson, D. R. Johnson, D. J. Yu, M. Burnham, and C. Carothers. 2020. Sustainability, resilience, adaptation, and transformation: tensions and plural approaches. Ecology and Society 25(3):4. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-11642-250304
Electronic Life Histories: At Home with E-waste Waste Materialities and Meaning
The interdisciplinary Electronic Life Histories Project integrates behavioral archaeology, engineering, anthropology, art, material culture, and science and technology studies to employ a life history model, community-based research and creative engagement to address the making of electronic waste. Focused in the Greater Lafayette area of Indiana, which is home to a major university, this project examines the entanglements among people, electroni…
Pondering Grassroots Development Initiatives: Evidence from Haiti and Jamaica
This article explores a program designed to encourage a structure of local development committees (LDCs) to galvanize possibilities for residents’ exercise of political agency to engender social learning for shared decision-making for development through higher education in Haiti. It also examines a grassroots effort among a group of rural Haitian farmers to develop a local response to changing agricultural conditions aimed at improving their cro…
Making Influence Visible: Innovating Ethnography at the Paris Climate Summit
Although Indigenous Peoples make significant contributions to global environmental governance and were prominent actors at the 2015 Paris Climate Summit, COP21, they remain largely invisible in conventional, mainstream, and academic accounts of COP21. In this article, we adopt feminist collaborative event ethnography to draw attention to often marginalized and unrecognized actors and help make visible processes that are often invisible in the stu…
Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World
Some critical international relations scholars have adopted theories of governmentality both as a heuristic framework for exploring modalities and functions of power and as a descriptive tool to explore the oppressive effects of global liberalism. I argue that, as a descriptive tool, much governmentality literature remains rooted in the same substantialist ontology and epistemology as the liberal discourses it seeks to criticize. This ontological…
Governmentalizing the Post–Cold War International Regime: The UN Debate on Democratization and Good Governance
This article examines a range of “good governance” discourses and practices at the United Nations as elements of global governmentality. It explores the emergence of “good governance” as a political rational for the UN, the mechanisms of governmentality that have been promoted as a consequence, and some of their most important effects
Intersectionality shapes adaptation to social-ecological change
People from across the Caylloma Province of Peru are adapting to social-ecological changes, such as decreasing water supplies and rapidly retreating glaciers, in different and unequal ways. In this study, we show how this inequality is intersectional; identities like gender and age compound and interact with systems of power to shape how people adapt to these changes at the individual, household, and district scales. We draw from 130 semi-structu…
Cacophonies of Aid, Failed State Building and NGO s in Haiti: Setting the stage for disaster, envisioning the future
The January 2010 earthquake in Haiti was a catastrophe not only for the loss of life it caused, but also because it destroyed the very thin layer of state administrative capacity that was in place in the country. This article argues that the fragility of the Haitian state institutions was exacerbated by international strategies that promoted NGOs as substitutes for the state. These strategies have generated a vicious circle that, while solving im…
Taking different ways of knowing seriously: Cross-Cultural Work as Translations and Multiplicity
Taming chaos: A foucauldian view of UN peacekeeping, democracy and normalization
In confronting a proliferation of unpredictable post-cold war threats, UN peacekeeping attempts to maintain order by normalizing the international arena. Normality is identified with democracy; non-democratic regimes are considered as potential menaces. Pro-democracy peacekeeping is an instance of an international regime that aims at taming chaos through disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms directed at reforming the institutions of potentially …
Resistance and the politics of negotiation: Women, place and space among the Kayapó in Amazonia, Brazil
In this article, I suggest that a critical analysis of Kayapó participation in resistance strategies should be inclusive of negotiated politics, everyday resistance and micro-scale strategies of contestation along with the public and highly dramatic. In particular, I interweave theories of gender, resistance and space to analyse women's strategies of resistance and spaces of negotiation in a Kayapó village. I not only emphasize the performative p…
Navigating the spaces between human rights and justice: Cultivating Indigenous representation in global environmental governance
How and in what ways do 'marginalized' actors influence global environmental governance? Through a collaborative event ethnography of the Paris Climate Summit (COP21), we examine power as it emerges through interactions between actors, institutions, and spaces, focusing on Indigenous Peoples' engagement at the international treaty negotiations. The findings show how Indigenous Peoples generate new meanings and avenues for their pursuits of justic…
Comparison of Direct Transfers for Human Capital Development and Environmental Conservation
Imagining Democracy, Building Unsustainable Institutions: The UN Peacekeeping Operation in Haiti
This article employs theoretical tools devised by Michel Foucault to explore the political rationale, technologies of government, and unintended consequences of UN efforts at statebuilding and democratization in the context of the peacekeeping operation in Haiti. It aims to offer an empirically oriented contribution to the study of the modalities of international intervention in the post-Cold War period and the effects of transplanting institutio…
Ethics in a Quantum World
This forum invites a reflection on how we may understand ethics in global studies in light of the growing debate on thinking through quantum for the social sciences and humanities more broadly. Quantum principles such as entanglement and indeterminism challenge the notions of individuality and subjectivity and the validity of universal principles as sufficient guidelines for agency, all notions that constitute the foundations of modern deontologi…
The relationship between household structures and everyday adaptation and livelihood strategies in northwestern Pakistan
The interactions between household size, capital, and adaptation to social-ecological change has been widely studied; however, little is known about the differences in everyday adaptation to social-ecological change across household structures. Joint family households are increasing in contexts where the nuclear family had previously been the norm, and remains a prevalent structure throughout the world. Thus, it is important to understand how the…
Water and life: Hydroelectric development and indigenous pathways to justice in the Brazilian Amazon
This paper analyzes the Kayapó's struggle against large-scale hydroelectric development in the Brazilian Amazon. Whereas environmental justice efforts that were launched in the 1980s against a similar dam project were met with success, efforts in the past several years to halt the Belo Monte dam, to date, have not stopped licensing or construction. And in spite of the rise of regional and international indigenous movements, environmental awarenes…
The Politics of Possession: The Proliferation of Partnerships in the Brazilian Amazon
Centered on one village, Aukre, this article discusses new types of intervillage ties and coordination in the Kayapó lands in Brazil. Present-day village politics are animated by a diverse array of old and emergent partnerships in the Amazon region. The Kayapó effort to preserve their homeland has resulted in communities' networking, articulating, and partnering with many different types of stakeholders as a response to the territorialization of …
Political ecology and decolonial research: Co-production with the Iñupiat in Utqiaġvik
Environmental social science research designs have shifted over the past several decades to include an increased commitment to multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary team-based work that have had dual but complementary foci. These address power and equity in the substantive aspects of research, and also to adopt more engaged forms of practice, including decolonial approaches. The fields of political ecology, human geography, and environmental anth…
Sustainability, resilience, adaptation, and transformation: Tensions and Plural Approaches
Zanotti, L., Z. Ma, J. L. Johnson, D. R. Johnson, D. J. Yu, M. Burnham, and C. Carothers. 2020. Sustainability, resilience, adaptation, and transformation: tensions and plural approaches. Ecology and Society 25(3):4. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-11642-250304
Hybrid Natures: Community Conservation Partnerships in the Kayapó Lands
This article analyzes a more than two-decade long partnership between the Kayapó, an Amazonian indigenous group, and a large environmental NGO. Drawing from political ecology and science and technology studies and building upon the literature concerning community-conservation partnerships, I examine the outcomes of an ecological research program near one village in Brazil. While scholars have posited that hybridized forms of knowledge, landscapes…
Conflicting Cultures of Nature: Ecotourism, Education and the Kayapó of the Brazilian Amazon
Despite advancements in the design and implementation of ecotourism, the educational component of ecotourism has received little attention in comparison to ecological, economic and other social factors. This article discusses the unexplored conventions of education as a form of empowerment in ecotourism through the case study of a pilot ecotourism project co-managed by an ecologist, an anthropologist and a Kayapó indigenous community in Brazil. D…
De-colonizing the political ontology of Kantian ethics: A quantum perspective
This article explores the relevance of ontological assumptions for justifications of agency and ethics. It critiques Kantian ethics for being based upon an ontological imaginary that starts from the substantialism of Newtonian physics. Substantialism shapes Western political philosophy’s view about who we are as subjects and how the world works. In this ontological imaginary, validation of ethics is based upon universality and abstractions. Furth…
Reorienting IR: Ontological Entanglement, Agency, and Ethics
International Aid, Local Ownership, and Survival: Development and Higher Education in Rural Haiti
This case study of Rural Haitian University highlights the complexities and consequences that may arise from a combination of unpredictable streams of international funding, financial vulnerability of communities, and the strategies that civic leaders employ to mobilize resources. We argue that the encounter sketched here of local vulnerability following protracted social conflict and a major natural disaster with the international aid machinery …
Economic Diversification and Sustainable Development: The Role Non-timber Forest Products Play in the Monetization of Kayapó Livelihoods
This paper analyzes the level of market integration of a relatively isolated Kayapó community. The goal is to understand how the commercial networks devoted to non-timber forest products are affecting one community by including cash-income into the economic life of communities previously dominated by non-monetary transactions but currently dominated by a mix of monetary and non-monetary practices. Non-timber forest product projects are a much lau…
Outsourcing governance in Peru’s integrated water resources management
Participatory water governance has become highly influential around the world as a means for managing water resources. Scholars and practitioners advocate for the inclusion of previously marginalized communities in water resources management through the devolution of power, responsibility, and participation. Where community institutions are weak or missing, experts recommend strengthening or re-building them to enable inclusive decision-making ov…
How do Indigenous and local knowledge systems respond to climate change
Popovici, R., A. G. de L. Moraes, Z. Ma, L. Zanotti, K. A. Cherkauer, A. E. Erwin, K. E. Mazer, E. F. Bocardo Delgado, J. P. Pinto Cáceres, P. Ranjan, and L. S. Prokopy. 2021. How do Indigenous and local knowledge systems respond to climate change? Ecology and Society 26(3):27. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-12481-260327
Governmentalizing the Post–Cold War International Regime: The UN Debate on Democratization and Good Governance
This article examines a range of “good governance” discourses and practices at the United Nations as elements of global governmentality. It explores the emergence of “good governance” as a political rational for the UN, the mechanisms of governmentality that have been promoted as a consequence, and some of their most important effects
Taming chaos: A foucauldian view of UN peacekeeping, democracy and normalization
In confronting a proliferation of unpredictable post-cold war threats, UN peacekeeping attempts to maintain order by normalizing the international arena. Normality is identified with democracy; non-democratic regimes are considered as potential menaces. Pro-democracy peacekeeping is an instance of an international regime that aims at taming chaos through disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms directed at reforming the institutions of potentially …
Normalizing democracy and human rights: Discipline, resistance and carceralization in Croatia's Euro-Atlantic integration
Imagining Democracy, Building Unsustainable Institutions: The UN Peacekeeping Operation in Haiti
This article employs theoretical tools devised by Michel Foucault to explore the political rationale, technologies of government, and unintended consequences of UN efforts at statebuilding and democratization in the context of the peacekeeping operation in Haiti. It aims to offer an empirically oriented contribution to the study of the modalities of international intervention in the post-Cold War period and the effects of transplanting institutio…
Conflicting Cultures of Nature: Ecotourism, Education and the Kayapó of the Brazilian Amazon
Despite advancements in the design and implementation of ecotourism, the educational component of ecotourism has received little attention in comparison to ecological, economic and other social factors. This article discusses the unexplored conventions of education as a form of empowerment in ecotourism through the case study of a pilot ecotourism project co-managed by an ecologist, an anthropologist and a Kayapó indigenous community in Brazil. D…
Economic Diversification and Sustainable Development: The Role Non-timber Forest Products Play in the Monetization of Kayapó Livelihoods
This paper analyzes the level of market integration of a relatively isolated Kayapó community. The goal is to understand how the commercial networks devoted to non-timber forest products are affecting one community by including cash-income into the economic life of communities previously dominated by non-monetary transactions but currently dominated by a mix of monetary and non-monetary practices. Non-timber forest product projects are a much lau…
Environmental Social Sciences: Methods and Research Design
The relationship between human communities and the environment is extremely complex. In order to resolve the issues involved with this relationship, interdisciplinary research combining natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities is necessary. In this 2010 book, specialists summarise methods and research strategies for various aspects of social research devoted to environmental issues. Each chapter is illustrated with ethnographic and envir…
UN Integrated Peacekeeping Operations and NGOs: Reflections on Governmental Rationalities and Contestation in the Age of Risk
In the first decade of the new millennium, with the adoption at the UN of the ‘responsibility to protect’ as the organizing concept for intervention, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) emerge as increasingly important partners in international peacekeeping operations. Postmodernist analysts of liberal international security have critically addressed the growing role of international interventionism as well as NGOs. The literature, however, has…
Cacophonies of Aid, Failed State Building and NGO s in Haiti: Setting the stage for disaster, envisioning the future
The January 2010 earthquake in Haiti was a catastrophe not only for the loss of life it caused, but also because it destroyed the very thin layer of state administrative capacity that was in place in the country. This article argues that the fragility of the Haitian state institutions was exacerbated by international strategies that promoted NGOs as substitutes for the state. These strategies have generated a vicious circle that, while solving im…
The Politics of Possession: The Proliferation of Partnerships in the Brazilian Amazon
Centered on one village, Aukre, this article discusses new types of intervillage ties and coordination in the Kayapó lands in Brazil. Present-day village politics are animated by a diverse array of old and emergent partnerships in the Amazon region. The Kayapó effort to preserve their homeland has resulted in communities' networking, articulating, and partnering with many different types of stakeholders as a response to the territorialization of …
The United Nations’ and the European Union’s Conceptualizations of Peace: Risk Management, Post-Cold War Security and the Normalization of Croatia
This article explores the United Nations (UN) and European Union (EU) conceptualizations of international security and, through the case of Croatia, their policies for peacekeeping and peace building. It argues that in the post-Cold War period, international organizations reconceived security as risk management. International and supra-national organizations adopted a variety of strategies aimed at transforming potentially disorderly states into …
A Post-Liberal Peace' and 'International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance
Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World
Some critical international relations scholars have adopted theories of governmentality both as a heuristic framework for exploring modalities and functions of power and as a descriptive tool to explore the oppressive effects of global liberalism. I argue that, as a descriptive tool, much governmentality literature remains rooted in the same substantialist ontology and epistemology as the liberal discourses it seeks to criticize. This ontological…
Resistance and the politics of negotiation: Women, place and space among the Kayapó in Amazonia, Brazil
In this article, I suggest that a critical analysis of Kayapó participation in resistance strategies should be inclusive of negotiated politics, everyday resistance and micro-scale strategies of contestation along with the public and highly dramatic. In particular, I interweave theories of gender, resistance and space to analyse women's strategies of resistance and spaces of negotiation in a Kayapó village. I not only emphasize the performative p…
Limits to Knowledge: Indigenous Peoples, NGOs, and the Moral Economy in the Eastern Amazon of Brazil
Despite widespread recognition of the importance of community-conservation partnerships, problems continue to emerge. In this paper we examine one such interaction to propose that outside organisations have wrongly associated the delimitations of the habitational space with the extent of community allegiances and moral economies. Such oversights can lead to project withdrawal, as they did in one case of an ecotourism proposal among the indigenous…
Questioning universalism, devising an ethics without foundations: An exploration of international relations ontologies and epistemologies
In this article, I explore the ontological and epistemological assumptions of the ethical universalism that constitutes the basis for international intervention. I argue grounding ethical decisions upon abstract normativity diverts attention from what is at stake in specific situations and may lead to self-appeasement and de-responsabilization. In order to re-imagine political agency in an interconnected world, we must engage in a reflection abou…
Political ecology of movement: Trekking and territoriality among the Kayapó
One key strand of political ecology inquiry draws attention to different scalar aspects of territorial control and environmental governance, especially as they relate to inequity, power, and marginality in the rural South. Simultaneously, in the past several decades scholars have argued for a more meaningful engagement with space and place, as global forces of capitalism and geographies of difference make and unmake places in surprising and often…
Hybrid Natures: Community Conservation Partnerships in the Kayapó Lands
This article analyzes a more than two-decade long partnership between the Kayapó, an Amazonian indigenous group, and a large environmental NGO. Drawing from political ecology and science and technology studies and building upon the literature concerning community-conservation partnerships, I examine the outcomes of an ecological research program near one village in Brazil. While scholars have posited that hybridized forms of knowledge, landscapes…
Introduction: Hybrid Landscapes: Science, Conservation, and the Production of Nature
IntroductionHybrid Landscapes: Science, Conservation, and the Production of Nature Reade Davis and Laura Zanotti The articles included in this special collection examine the implementation of varied conservation agendas, seeking to integrate the strengths of a political ecology framework with insights derived from Science and Technology Studies (STS). By taking an ethnographic approach to the study of conservation projects, they challenge the nat…
Deforestation of montane cloud forest in the Central Highlands of Guatemala: Contributing factors and implications for sustainability in Q’eqchi’ communities
Cloud forest in the Central Highlands of Guatemala provides important ecosystem services for the Q’eqchi’ Maya but has been disappearing at an increasing rate in recent decades. This research documents changes in cloud forest cover, explores some contributing factors to deforestation, and considers forest preservation and food security implications for Q’eqchi’ communities. We used a transdisciplinary framework that synthesized remote sensing/GIS…
Introductory essay: Environmental justice – just livelihoods
Environmental justice (EJ), or the issue of ensuring fair access to environmental decision-making and resources for all groups in society, is a critical concern across the world. Too frequently, en
Water and life: Hydroelectric development and indigenous pathways to justice in the Brazilian Amazon
This paper analyzes the Kayapó's struggle against large-scale hydroelectric development in the Brazilian Amazon. Whereas environmental justice efforts that were launched in the 1980s against a similar dam project were met with success, efforts in the past several years to halt the Belo Monte dam, to date, have not stopped licensing or construction. And in spite of the rise of regional and international indigenous movements, environmental awarenes…
Biopolitical and Disciplinary Peacebuilding: Sport, Reforming Bodies and Rebuilding Societies
The peacebuilding political rationality established in the first years of the current century broadened the target of such efforts from state institutions to populations and adopted an array of disciplinary and biopolitical techniques aimed at changing individuals and the ways they live together. This article explores international organization discourses on sport and peacebuilding and argues that the broad consensus on sport as a peacebuilding s…
International Aid, Local Ownership, and Survival: Development and Higher Education in Rural Haiti
This case study of Rural Haitian University highlights the complexities and consequences that may arise from a combination of unpredictable streams of international funding, financial vulnerability of communities, and the strategies that civic leaders employ to mobilize resources. We argue that the encounter sketched here of local vulnerability following protracted social conflict and a major natural disaster with the international aid machinery …
Taking different ways of knowing seriously: Cross-Cultural Work as Translations and Multiplicity
Sociology (42 works) · Political science (40 works) · Law (28 works) · Politics (28 works) · Law (25 works) · Geography (16 works) · Social science (16 works) · Ecology (15 works) · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management (14 works) · Environmental ethics (14 works)