CONTACT: p.campanile@berkeley.edu; pinaforte@berkeley.edu; leonoraz@berkeley.edu
The Ecologies of Difference working group is a collaboration of place-based thinkers dedicated to employing the many lessons learned from critical black feminist ecology, political ecology, queer ecology, postcolonial theory, and indigenous criticism in order to develop fieldwork methods and modes of writing in line with these ruptures of Enlightenment epistemology. We approach various sites and landscapes as archives whose fragments and ruins tell of their violent production.
We find that landscape itself has been transformed into ecocidal infrastructure: for capital, for empire, for whiteness, for heteropatriarchy. This infrastructure gets mistaken for “Nature.” While we acknowledge the effort of recent scholarship to name it–the Anthropocene–this concept risks heightening forgetting by insisting that the recognition of global catastrophe obviates the need to redress particular instances of its violence. We seek to unearth the fragments that belie the production and forgetting of this infrastructure in order to highlight how ecologies become appropriated for the task of domination through their being gendered and racialized.