About
Lefebvre for Activists
Activist Ecologies
News / Open Call
Contact
From the Right to the City to the Right to the Planet
Activist Ecologies invites authors, activists, artists, and communities organised around environmental struggles to collectively examine contemporary environmental activisms and articulate them in relation to global politics of care. Academic and activist interest in care has exponentially grown in recent years, with feminist critiques also addressing the ambivalent, always political connotation of this term. At the intersection of practice, ethics, affect, and knowledge, “care” does not only describe a range of activities involved in reproducing the conditions for more-than-human coexistence. It is also power-laden, with governments variously instrumentalising the term to prescribe who and what is eligible or deserving of “care”. From this double nature rises the relevance of reflecting on and articulating care within environmental activisms as resistant to state-led, top-down politics.
The pervasive ecological crises of our age demonstrate that hegemonic politics, guided by anthropocentric and extractivist logics, are unfit to shape the metabolic relations between humans and more-than-humans. Particular interests, developmentalist policies and investment-heavy technological fixes notably block the deep social change that the capitalist polycrisis necessitates. A plethora of environmental conservation approaches (including the “green new deals” stipulated, e.g., in the EU and USA) reveal government and corporate efforts to exploit the climate crisis for capitalist and neo-colonial endeavours. The creation of “forest reserves”, planting of trees to “offset” CO2 emissions—mostly at the cost of local and indigenous communities in countries of the majority world—is a case in point. Understanding the advantages of framing environmental activism as a practice of care, reconciling ecofeminist and political ecology positions, Activist Ecologies highlights the current scope and horizons of mobilisations that rise from, and/or point to, care-full relations outside of such politics-as-usual.
This book will extend Kollektiv Quotidien’s fruitful editorial collaboration on the book Lefebvre for Activists, in which scholars, scholar-activists and resident organisations explored the viability of some of French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s most important concepts—spatial practice, everyday life, the right to the city, appropriation,concrete utopia—in current urban struggles. Through this spatial perspective, the where and when of activist organising against gentrification, top-down planning, segregation, and varied forms of discrimination, came into focus. The new edited volume specifies this approach. Informed by Lefebvre's concept of “concrete utopias”, or the possibilities to change the social relations of which everyday life provides plenty of examples and inceptions, it conceptualises activism as concrete utopia made explicit. Thereby, activism itself is ecologically embedded, relying on the daily practices and environments in which it flourishes. This underlines that emancipatory processes are simultaneously locally specific and part of broader ecologies, facilitated by more-than-human actants, translocal solidarities, and decentralised but coordinated practices.
Gathering insights about environmental activism from this spatial and concrete-utopian vantage point, Activist Ecologies dialogues with and complements publications united in advancing reflection and practice around radical change at a time when this seems most acutely needed. Amidst ever more extreme geological and biospheric phenomena, distressed economies, globally reawakening authoritarianisms, and far-right orientations—not to mention the definitive betrayal of the alleged humanist foundations of modern societies: the West’s complicity in genocide in Palestine—activism in general, and environmental movements in particular, operates in a shifting landscape. Anti-racist and anti-colonial movements have gained ground, but this is true for identitarian and right-wing movements too; mobilisations for the environment are better organised and more visible, but sustainability buzzwords have also been appropriated by conservative, including far-right, groups for sheer political calculus (e.g. before elections) and “not in my backyard”-sort of protests.
In a parallel trend, while the COVID-19 pandemic unequivocally showed the existential importance of self-organised infrastructures of care, care has become ever more difficult to deliver due to austerity measures, geopolitical conflicts, and wars. Against this background, Activist Ecologies …
→ presents sites of resistance to, e.g., land grabs, privatisations, and environmentally damaging projects in more-than-urban settings, highlighting how specific spatial conditions affect activisms
→ validates and connects movements that embrace situated knowledge to advance more-than-human care practices
→ brings ecofeminist and posthumanist discourses into conversation with Lefebvre’s theories, by focussing the spatial facets and preconditions of practices of more-than-human care within environmental activisms
→ complements academic and activist engagements with activism through contributions that draw on artistic research and art practice.
With patriarchy, imperialism, and colonialism creating disadvantage differentials along the lines of gender, geography, and race, the environmental crises and their consequences—unsettled ecologies, aggravating displacements, and migrations on a planetary scale—do not affect everyone equally. Gathering contributions from the majority and minority worlds, the edited volume underscores these differentials and unequal dependencies without falling into the trap of divisive thinking. Worldwide activisms show that solutions are local, but the toxic triad which causes the polycrisis is global. By inciting reflection on how environmental mobilisations unfold thanks to multilayered and locally specific relatings between human inhabitants, flora, fauna, geology, geography, climate events, etc., Activist Ecologies reminds that struggle is present, alive, and responds to shared problems, boosting solidarity and nurturing hope in the joys and challenges of defiant action.