The first in a series of talks planned collaboratively by SPAM, CARG, and CRIE: Critical Anthropocene Speaker Series: Global, Decolonial, Critical Race Approaches for a Multispecies World
As we move further into the Anthropocene, questions about how to intervene in the environment have progressed with new purpose and ambition. It’s no longer possible to deny the change afoot and even more urgent that we refuse and replace the ideology of scarcity. In the ongoing discussions about strategies for multi-species flourishing, Collard et al (2015) made a welcome call for a politics of abundance that deals with historical violence of settler-capitalism, creating pluriversal solidarities and recognising animal autonomy. The process of creating the political grounds from which we can develop such strategy requires that we think through the political economy of anthropocentric capitalism. In this paper we seek to chart out potential strategy and goals that make abundance possible. Our approach is to elaborate a multi-species production politics in key sites of extraction and violence. Of capitalist food and energy, we ask: what is the surplus composed of, who controls is and how it is distributed? How might we differently organise production in order to enable life to flourish? We argue that by recognising that all production is multi-species in nature, we can begin to develop answers to these questions. We explore possible strategic goals that flow from a multi-species production politics, focussing in on ending exploitative and coercive labour and property relations.
The talk will take place online on September 15th at 7 PM EST via Zoom: please email Rosemary Collard at rcollardsfuca for the link.
Beck Pearse works at the intersection of social theory and political economy at the Australian National University. Her teaching and research focuses on environmental inequalities, policy and social change. Beck’s latest book, Pricing Carbon in Australia (Routledge/Earthscan, 2018), explores the rise and fall of Australia’s short-lived emissions trading scheme. Her research on the political economy of carbon markets, environmental movements, gender relations, and the coloniality of knowledge has been published in Energy Policy, Environmental Politics, The Sociological Review, Feminist Economics, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, and elsewhere.
Dinesh Wadiwel is Senior Lecturer in human rights and socio-legal studies at University of Sydney. He is author of the monograph The War against Animals (Brill, 2015) and is co-editor, with Matthew Chrulew of Foucault and Animals (Brill 2017). He is a member of the Multispecies Justice research group at the University of Sydney, and Chair of the Australasian Animal Studies Association. He is finalising a book on animals and capitalism.