Alex A Moulton
Biographic Data
| ID | 1602107 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alex A Moulton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alex A |
| FAMILY NAME | Moulton |
| SIGNATURE | MOULTON A A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hunter College |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8768-8503 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 67 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The labor of nature/the nature of labor
This article presents a novel critique of ecosystem service valuation (ESV) by problematizing the labor theory of value (LTV) that is inherent to the liberal economic framework from which it is derived. This discussion reveals that ESV and other approaches to valuing nature are based on two faulty and related elements: 1) a Cartesian dualism that posits humans and nature as distinct, which in turn leads to 2) the incomplete application of its own…
Dispatches from consequential geography: Introduction – Volume 44, issue 4
We recognized each other before: On the confluences and constellations of Black geographies, geographies of the Black Atlantic, and Black ecologies
This rejoinder dialogues with the commentaries bestowed on our article by focusing on three themes: the contours of discipline, love as struggle, and shared grammars for coming storms and those already with us. We argue that, while academic disciplines often function as colonial infrastructures designed to channel and contain knowledge, a Black geographical scholarly praxis embraces confluences - processes of becoming stronger through the converg…
Maroon Geographies
In the world of Atlantic slavery and colonialism, the term “Maroon” became a descriptor of self‐liberated people. While the term is most used to refer to Black people who freed themselves from servitude through flight to isolated geographies, the Indigenous Taino people of Hispaniola were among the earliest maroons. Through their flight from slavery, their establishment of autonomous communities, and resistance to colonial authorities, maroons re…
Black livingness and insurgent ecological politics: Thinking across Black geographies / Atlantics / ecologies
Geographical scholarship on the agency and practices of peoples of African descent now flourishes across a diverse range of frameworks and approaches. This article highlights three salient trajectories: Black geographies, geographies of the Black Atlantic and Black ecologies – subfields that, despite considerable overlaps, have developed with little direct dialogue or collaboration. We begin by summarizing their respective methodological and theo…
Taking hoaxes seriously: Epistemic dangers, academic privilege, and social relations of believability
In ‘Taking “Nonsense” Seriously’, Matthew Hannah (2026) explains that cross-epistemic fluency has been a crucial factor informing the creation, circulation, and recognition of hoaxes and spoofs. Hannah is concerned with how and why, even when a hoax or spoof is apparent, such interventions in the academy can be seen as ‘sense-bearing, valuable, or potentially fruitful’. There is much sense in Hannah's proposition to take spurious papers seriously…
Beyond the Anthropocene Ark Ecology of Climate Havens and Spaceships
This discussion of Malcom Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2022) argues that Ferdinand maps the double fracture constituting modernity haunting its socioecologies—one fracture characterized by racialized social inequality, the other by intersecting ecological crises. Thinking at the crosscurrents of political ecology, landscape history, postcolonial theory, and political philosophy, Ferdinand advances the case fo…
Black Lifeworlds: Poetic Black Geographies and Ecologies
The two poems that are submitted collectively as "Black Lifeworlds" are interventions in nature-society discussions. They are specifically concerned with the radical challenge that Black Geographies and Black Ecologies make vis-a-vis scholarship and discourse that are silent on the role of race in the production of space and nature. The first poem challenges racial discourses that relegate antiblackness to the colonial and antebellum period compa…
Modernity's Antillean ecologies: Dispossession, disasters, justice, and repair across the Caribbean archipelago
The Caribbean region has been (re)shaped by colonial transformations of Amerindian ecologies, enslavement of Africans, and Indenture of Asians on plantations designed for European profit. Yet longstanding practices of resistance to human–environmental domination and ecocidal violence have enabled Caribbean people to (re)create and sustain affirmative socio-ecologies. This report reflects on four axes characterizing the contestations over Caribbe…
Plotting a New Course for Environmental Humanities
This article suggests that the notion of "the plot" has methodological and epistemological value for the environmental humanities. Conceptualized in the work of Sylvia Wynter, the plot-as material site and narrative mode crucial to the novel form-offers a heuristic for analyzing the conjuncture of political economy, social-cultural aesthetics, and power. The plot names places that have been created through improvisational forms of world-making ag…
Toward 'Fugitivity as Method: An Introduction to the Special Issue
Recent studies on fugitivity, marronage, and other forms of flight from racial violence and dehumanization have mapped a historical and spatial archipelago of Black and Indigenous freedom struggles across the Caribbean and the Americas. Narratives of fugitivity recuperate the diverse and widespread practices of resistance and refusal that have always accompanied racial violence in these geographies. While scholars have demonstrated the ongoing-ne…
Towards the arboreal side-effects of marronage: Black geographies and ecologies of the Jamaican forest
The English colonial plan of converting Jamaica into a settler colony was challenged by the Maroons who established communities in the interior of the island. Living in the forests at the edge of the expanding plantation system, Maroons were feared by aspiring white settlercolonists. The zone where the plantation and white settlements met the Maroon de-facto territory became a frontier zone, where race, belonging, and freedom were contested. The …
Black Geographies and Black Ecologies as Insurgent Ecocriticism
Black geographies and Black ecologies are epistemological frameworks that attend to the ideological, philosophical, and material portent of Black movements in dialectical, but not deterministic, relationships with the geographies and environments of Black life and struggle. This article reviews the Black geographies and Black ecologies literature, showing the convergence of these bodies of scholarship around themes of racial, spatial, and ecologi…
Black monument matters: Place‐based commemoration and abolitionist memory work
Discrete monuments remain in the domain of the symbolic, land as mnemonic shifts to a more materialist commemorative praxis. This paper proposes a turn toward land as mnemonic of Black freedom struggle and place‐making. Reviewing the scholarship on memoryscapes, I show that the critical insights of Black ecologies and geographies scholarship has moved further than traditional scholarship and offers multiple openings for new monuments and commemor…
On and beyond traumatic fallout: Unsettling Political Ecology in Practice and Scholarship
Franz Fanon poignantly argued that trauma is both an act and a memory of wounding that haunts subjects of violence. Addressing geographies of trauma, and the way that trauma is treated in the discipline of geography, is a matter of both theoretical and practical importance for critical human-environment scholars. However, discussions about uneven and ongoing geographies of trauma and violence - particularly in ways that enroll researchers themsel…
Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises
The “Plantationocene” has gained traction in the environmental humanities as a way of conceptualizing the current era otherwise nominated as the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or the Chthulucene. For Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, and their interlocutors, the concept suggests that our current ecological crisis is rooted in logics of environmental modernization, homogeneity, and control, which were developed on historical plantations. This paper argues t…
Greenhouse governmentality: Protected agriculture and the changing biopolitical management of agrarian life in Jamaica
This paper draws upon Foucauldian theories of governmentality and biopower to examine the recent growth of greenhouse cultivation on the island of Jamaica. Greenhouse farming has been widely promoted as a means to enhance the efficiency, technological sophistication, and profitability of the island's traditional small-scale farmers. Following Foucault, and drawing on a series of interviews with greenhouse growers, we read this intervention as for…
Black monument matters: Place‐based commemoration and abolitionist memory work
Discrete monuments remain in the domain of the symbolic, land as mnemonic shifts to a more materialist commemorative praxis. This paper proposes a turn toward land as mnemonic of Black freedom struggle and place‐making. Reviewing the scholarship on memoryscapes, I show that the critical insights of Black ecologies and geographies scholarship has moved further than traditional scholarship and offers multiple openings for new monuments and commemor…
Toward 'Fugitivity as Method: An Introduction to the Special Issue
Recent studies on fugitivity, marronage, and other forms of flight from racial violence and dehumanization have mapped a historical and spatial archipelago of Black and Indigenous freedom struggles across the Caribbean and the Americas. Narratives of fugitivity recuperate the diverse and widespread practices of resistance and refusal that have always accompanied racial violence in these geographies. While scholars have demonstrated the ongoing-ne…
Greenhouse governmentality: Protected agriculture and the changing biopolitical management of agrarian life in Jamaica
This paper draws upon Foucauldian theories of governmentality and biopower to examine the recent growth of greenhouse cultivation on the island of Jamaica. Greenhouse farming has been widely promoted as a means to enhance the efficiency, technological sophistication, and profitability of the island's traditional small-scale farmers. Following Foucault, and drawing on a series of interviews with greenhouse growers, we read this intervention as for…
Towards the arboreal side-effects of marronage: Black geographies and ecologies of the Jamaican forest
The English colonial plan of converting Jamaica into a settler colony was challenged by the Maroons who established communities in the interior of the island. Living in the forests at the edge of the expanding plantation system, Maroons were feared by aspiring white settlercolonists. The zone where the plantation and white settlements met the Maroon de-facto territory became a frontier zone, where race, belonging, and freedom were contested. The …
Plotting a New Course for Environmental Humanities
This article suggests that the notion of "the plot" has methodological and epistemological value for the environmental humanities. Conceptualized in the work of Sylvia Wynter, the plot-as material site and narrative mode crucial to the novel form-offers a heuristic for analyzing the conjuncture of political economy, social-cultural aesthetics, and power. The plot names places that have been created through improvisational forms of world-making ag…
On and beyond traumatic fallout: Unsettling Political Ecology in Practice and Scholarship
Franz Fanon poignantly argued that trauma is both an act and a memory of wounding that haunts subjects of violence. Addressing geographies of trauma, and the way that trauma is treated in the discipline of geography, is a matter of both theoretical and practical importance for critical human-environment scholars. However, discussions about uneven and ongoing geographies of trauma and violence - particularly in ways that enroll researchers themsel…
Modernity's Antillean ecologies: Dispossession, disasters, justice, and repair across the Caribbean archipelago
The Caribbean region has been (re)shaped by colonial transformations of Amerindian ecologies, enslavement of Africans, and Indenture of Asians on plantations designed for European profit. Yet longstanding practices of resistance to human–environmental domination and ecocidal violence have enabled Caribbean people to (re)create and sustain affirmative socio-ecologies. This report reflects on four axes characterizing the contestations over Caribbe…
Taking hoaxes seriously: Epistemic dangers, academic privilege, and social relations of believability
In ‘Taking “Nonsense” Seriously’, Matthew Hannah (2026) explains that cross-epistemic fluency has been a crucial factor informing the creation, circulation, and recognition of hoaxes and spoofs. Hannah is concerned with how and why, even when a hoax or spoof is apparent, such interventions in the academy can be seen as ‘sense-bearing, valuable, or potentially fruitful’. There is much sense in Hannah's proposition to take spurious papers seriously…
Greenhouse governmentality: Protected agriculture and the changing biopolitical management of agrarian life in Jamaica
This paper draws upon Foucauldian theories of governmentality and biopower to examine the recent growth of greenhouse cultivation on the island of Jamaica. Greenhouse farming has been widely promoted as a means to enhance the efficiency, technological sophistication, and profitability of the island's traditional small-scale farmers. Following Foucault, and drawing on a series of interviews with greenhouse growers, we read this intervention as for…
Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises
The “Plantationocene” has gained traction in the environmental humanities as a way of conceptualizing the current era otherwise nominated as the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or the Chthulucene. For Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, and their interlocutors, the concept suggests that our current ecological crisis is rooted in logics of environmental modernization, homogeneity, and control, which were developed on historical plantations. This paper argues t…
Black monument matters: Place‐based commemoration and abolitionist memory work
Discrete monuments remain in the domain of the symbolic, land as mnemonic shifts to a more materialist commemorative praxis. This paper proposes a turn toward land as mnemonic of Black freedom struggle and place‐making. Reviewing the scholarship on memoryscapes, I show that the critical insights of Black ecologies and geographies scholarship has moved further than traditional scholarship and offers multiple openings for new monuments and commemor…
On and beyond traumatic fallout: Unsettling Political Ecology in Practice and Scholarship
Franz Fanon poignantly argued that trauma is both an act and a memory of wounding that haunts subjects of violence. Addressing geographies of trauma, and the way that trauma is treated in the discipline of geography, is a matter of both theoretical and practical importance for critical human-environment scholars. However, discussions about uneven and ongoing geographies of trauma and violence - particularly in ways that enroll researchers themsel…
Black Geographies and Black Ecologies as Insurgent Ecocriticism
Black geographies and Black ecologies are epistemological frameworks that attend to the ideological, philosophical, and material portent of Black movements in dialectical, but not deterministic, relationships with the geographies and environments of Black life and struggle. This article reviews the Black geographies and Black ecologies literature, showing the convergence of these bodies of scholarship around themes of racial, spatial, and ecologi…
Toward 'Fugitivity as Method: An Introduction to the Special Issue
Recent studies on fugitivity, marronage, and other forms of flight from racial violence and dehumanization have mapped a historical and spatial archipelago of Black and Indigenous freedom struggles across the Caribbean and the Americas. Narratives of fugitivity recuperate the diverse and widespread practices of resistance and refusal that have always accompanied racial violence in these geographies. While scholars have demonstrated the ongoing-ne…
Towards the arboreal side-effects of marronage: Black geographies and ecologies of the Jamaican forest
The English colonial plan of converting Jamaica into a settler colony was challenged by the Maroons who established communities in the interior of the island. Living in the forests at the edge of the expanding plantation system, Maroons were feared by aspiring white settlercolonists. The zone where the plantation and white settlements met the Maroon de-facto territory became a frontier zone, where race, belonging, and freedom were contested. The …
Black Lifeworlds: Poetic Black Geographies and Ecologies
The two poems that are submitted collectively as "Black Lifeworlds" are interventions in nature-society discussions. They are specifically concerned with the radical challenge that Black Geographies and Black Ecologies make vis-a-vis scholarship and discourse that are silent on the role of race in the production of space and nature. The first poem challenges racial discourses that relegate antiblackness to the colonial and antebellum period compa…
Modernity's Antillean ecologies: Dispossession, disasters, justice, and repair across the Caribbean archipelago
The Caribbean region has been (re)shaped by colonial transformations of Amerindian ecologies, enslavement of Africans, and Indenture of Asians on plantations designed for European profit. Yet longstanding practices of resistance to human–environmental domination and ecocidal violence have enabled Caribbean people to (re)create and sustain affirmative socio-ecologies. This report reflects on four axes characterizing the contestations over Caribbe…
Plotting a New Course for Environmental Humanities
This article suggests that the notion of "the plot" has methodological and epistemological value for the environmental humanities. Conceptualized in the work of Sylvia Wynter, the plot-as material site and narrative mode crucial to the novel form-offers a heuristic for analyzing the conjuncture of political economy, social-cultural aesthetics, and power. The plot names places that have been created through improvisational forms of world-making ag…
Maroon Geographies
In the world of Atlantic slavery and colonialism, the term “Maroon” became a descriptor of self‐liberated people. While the term is most used to refer to Black people who freed themselves from servitude through flight to isolated geographies, the Indigenous Taino people of Hispaniola were among the earliest maroons. Through their flight from slavery, their establishment of autonomous communities, and resistance to colonial authorities, maroons re…
Black livingness and insurgent ecological politics: Thinking across Black geographies / Atlantics / ecologies
Geographical scholarship on the agency and practices of peoples of African descent now flourishes across a diverse range of frameworks and approaches. This article highlights three salient trajectories: Black geographies, geographies of the Black Atlantic and Black ecologies – subfields that, despite considerable overlaps, have developed with little direct dialogue or collaboration. We begin by summarizing their respective methodological and theo…
Taking hoaxes seriously: Epistemic dangers, academic privilege, and social relations of believability
In ‘Taking “Nonsense” Seriously’, Matthew Hannah (2026) explains that cross-epistemic fluency has been a crucial factor informing the creation, circulation, and recognition of hoaxes and spoofs. Hannah is concerned with how and why, even when a hoax or spoof is apparent, such interventions in the academy can be seen as ‘sense-bearing, valuable, or potentially fruitful’. There is much sense in Hannah's proposition to take spurious papers seriously…
Beyond the Anthropocene Ark Ecology of Climate Havens and Spaceships
This discussion of Malcom Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2022) argues that Ferdinand maps the double fracture constituting modernity haunting its socioecologies—one fracture characterized by racialized social inequality, the other by intersecting ecological crises. Thinking at the crosscurrents of political ecology, landscape history, postcolonial theory, and political philosophy, Ferdinand advances the case fo…
The labor of nature/the nature of labor
This article presents a novel critique of ecosystem service valuation (ESV) by problematizing the labor theory of value (LTV) that is inherent to the liberal economic framework from which it is derived. This discussion reveals that ESV and other approaches to valuing nature are based on two faulty and related elements: 1) a Cartesian dualism that posits humans and nature as distinct, which in turn leads to 2) the incomplete application of its own…
Dispatches from consequential geography: Introduction – Volume 44, issue 4
We recognized each other before: On the confluences and constellations of Black geographies, geographies of the Black Atlantic, and Black ecologies
This rejoinder dialogues with the commentaries bestowed on our article by focusing on three themes: the contours of discipline, love as struggle, and shared grammars for coming storms and those already with us. We argue that, while academic disciplines often function as colonial infrastructures designed to channel and contain knowledge, a Black geographical scholarly praxis embraces confluences - processes of becoming stronger through the converg…
Geographies of human-animal interactions (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Political science (7 works) · Politics (6 works) · Colonialism (5 works) · Caribbean history, culture, and politics (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Archaeology (3 works) · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature (3 works)