Care, commoning and restoration
Transforming human / non-human relationships through emotional political ecology
Political ecology is grappling with the challenge posed by new materialist perspectives across social sciences and humanities that emphasise the vibrancy of all (human and nonhuman) matter and call for scholars to go beyond anthropomorphic analysis centred on human impacts in our theorising. These presentations show how working with emotions may open space for transformative relations with the non-human world, based on care, commoning and restoration.
Scroll to the bottom of the page to access the recording of the live session for this panel held Wednesday 7th September.
Exploring Emotions to Understand how Power is Exercised in Human-Elephant Coexistence Efforts
Maureen W. Kinyanjui, University of Edinburgh, UK
Riverine relations, affective labor & subjectivity in Kerala
Sony RK, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Bangalore
Responsive restoration: Vegetal geographies, affect, and stewardship identities at Cane Run Creek
Karen S. Kinslow, University of Kentucky, USA
Professor Sango Mahanty from the Australian National University, Australia, provides an expert response to panellists:
A recording of the live session held for this panel:
Comments 7
Welcome to Panel 2 on Care, commoning and restoration,
What a fabulous set of papers – thank you to the three panelists. There were a number of common themes woven through the presentations that it could be interesting to explore further in the discussion forum, such as how emotions are enrolled in the construction of subjectivities. Please take a listen first to Sango’s comments, and respond to whichever you would like here in the discussion forum. I also encourage panelists and viewers to please post your own questions 🙂
One question Maureen posed that I would like to pose to all members of the panel is – How to demonstrate an ethics of care throughout the research, ensuring not to appropriate community voices, emotions and lived experiences?
And to add to Maureen’s question, I would be interested to hear from you all whether / how you have felt that focusing on emotions in research enables an ethics of care? Is focusing on emotions somehow less prone to research becoming extractive because we must deeply listen to the non-verbal aspects of communication and be present in our relations with participants in ways that we miss when focusing too much on verbal / rational / mainstream ways of understanding the world? Or maybe focusing on emotions risks different kinds of extractivist research, as we might assert our own understanding of emotions (eg what different voice tones, body language means in our interactions with participants) in ways that misrepresent others?
Thank you for your comments, Alice and Sango, on my presentation.
Concerning going beyond a utilitarian and functional view of emotions, my journey moving from a utilitarian perspective to deep listening was not so easy. I realised early on when I started my PhD fieldwork this year that I needed to stop coming up with project ideas or offering solutions as a response to perceiving or listening to emotions such as anger and frustrations being expressed during interviews or focus group discussions. While working as a conservationist in the same community, I tried to understand the causes of these emotions and then “solved” them by coming up with projects. I understood during my fieldwork that perhaps in trying to diffuse the negative emotions quickly to eventually increase tolerance towards elephants, I had overstepped my roles, and I was harming the community to an extent by placating them with projects and not giving them space to express themselves. I had, in other words, rendered technical their complex emotional geographies and real-life struggles and silenced them. This is when I learnt to be an active listener, to be present and learn empathy because being called out by community members for the projects I had initiated that were not helping them was not only uncomfortable, but also I acknowledged that not listening and not giving space to emotions was causing more harm to them and pushing them further into conflict with elephants.
Therefore, to answer some of your questions, Alice. I find that studying emotions has enabled an ethics of care in my research and hopefully makes it less extractive. I am conscious, though, that giving meaning and interpretations to people’s emotions can also be extractive or can subconsciously reinforce some hegemonic colonial conservation perspectives from my academic training over the years. To manage this, I plan to go back to the community and discuss my findings and analysis with them to receive their feedback. It is one of their requests because they do not want to be misrepresented like other previous research in the area have done.
For Sony:
Thank you for your presentation, Sony. I appreciate the different perspective of subjectivation as a bottom-up process; the focus on the local agency to contribute to their own environmental subjectivation is indeed an interesting concept. I also like how your work shows community members’ actions towards the ‘pollution shocks’ is influenced by their affective relationship with the rivers over time and not through a rational cognitive process, especially when you mentioned that experiencing pollution in the rivers is akin to losing life. Very powerful! My questions to you are
1. Why did you focus on affect and not emotions?
2. In terms of methodology, how were you able to measure/see affect?
3. Do you find different subjectivities such as class influence the level of labour invested in the movements – for example the less affluent people who might depend directly on the river resources are more invested in the movements because they are affected more?
Thank you for your presentation!
For Karen:
I am grateful for your presentation, Karen. As someone still trying to learn the conceptual differences between affect and emotions and how to use the concepts in my research, I appreciate you taking us through the definition and differences and using your research work to illustrate how the concept of affect can be operationalised in restoration practice. My questions for you are 1. In your research so far, have you encountered instances where a practitioner/volunteer has been affected differently by the restoration process over a period of time? For example, when they started and maybe two or three years later? If so, how does that influence how they shape the nature of their interventions? 2. Do you also recognise any changes in how you are affected by different aspects of the restoration process or the creek’s status as your knowledge expands from the literature review process and the direct empirical research practices at your field site? I found that the more I delved deeper into political ecology perspectives of human-elephant coexistence, I was affected differently by the human-elephant conflict as opposed to when I was exploring the conflict using only conservation literature. For me, some other issues became more pronounced, so instead of being only affected by the injuries of elephants in the community, I became increasingly more affected by community members’ daily struggles to survive, which is reflected by how my research is evolving.
Thanks. Time is a component of my research, and I am interested in exploring its role, including how perceptions and representations of time also affect restoration. My own perceptions have changed with my place-based participant observation throughout the course of my study, yes. KSK
All presenters discuss how care manifests through emotional expressions. My general questions for all three speakers are: What is care? And how does it manifest through emotions and experiences?
For Maureen,
I am very interested in how emotions are not only shaped by one major event but also by other factors such as microfinance and joblessness which create emotions such as shame and stress. My question for you is how do you think shame and stress play in collective actions?
For Sony,
I am really interested in how you talk about the care for the river and care for oneself and the community being mutually constructed by emotions. Can you explain more about what emotions have been expressed around the care? How are they shared and when?
For Karen,
You talked about the importance of direct experiences that played out in the stream restoration project. I was wondering if you can explore and explain more about how we know when we act from care and love. As you mentioned, emotions and effects are constantly changing, so are care and love?
I think stress is a unifying emotion in the community because it is experienced by most people and it is what is commoning them. Because of the stress brought on by night-guarding crops and having their fields cleared out by elephants, people are motivated to participate in protests against the government’s wildlife conservation institution. I also see that the stress of finding food and water can unify a village and cause them to action like the formation of a water committee to manage water conflicts and access and follow up on the county government’s promises to bring water to the community i.e. as a body to negotiate with the government.
On the other hand, from my observations in the field, shame can exclude people. Women who confessed to feeling shame identified with other women who also felt shame and identified themselves as ‘wanyonge’ loosely translated to the weak ones. As the ‘weak ones,’ they conveyed feeling powerless and unable to do anything about their situation. Most said only God could help them.
Thank you for your question, Sopheak. What I am suggesting here is that care might be site and situation specific and depend on the organisms present and what relationships and encounters take place. KSK