The UNMAKING research team convened a conference session at the POLLEN Biennial Conference 2020 for Political Ecology

The conference session “Unmaking the capitalist production of nature: exploring processes of (de)construction”, explored the different insights that political ecology can offer on the deconstruction of capitalist natures and the emergence of new, peri- or post-capitalist relations and practices. Together with Elisa Schramm (University of Oxford), Pieta Hyvärinen (Tampere University), Ian Florin (University of Geneva) and Rogelio Luque Lora (Cambridge University), we focused on the following questions:

1. How is the unmaking of capitalist natures intertwined with the making of non-capitalist natures?

2. Who are the actors, what are the spaces and practices of unmaking and making, and how do they connect through space and time?

3. Which elements of capitalist natures are unmade, and which elements tend to be reproduced?

4. How are non-capitalist natures made in a world “contaminated” by capitalist relations (both concerning the process and outcome)?

The speakers shared their research perspectives on these topics, speaking about the tensions between capitalist pressures and post-capitalist making in a neighbourhood garden (Elisa Schramm); mushroom foraging as a practice that produces difference in the capitalist “plantationocentrism” of forest management (Pieta Hyvärinen); comics as a form of dissent to the capitalist (symbolic) production of nature (Ian Florin); and inserting more-than-human elements into the social awakening of Chile as a form of unmaking (Rogelio Luque Lora). In the discussion, we focused on the tensions and contradictions that are inherent in processes of unmaking and made interesting links between research carried out in a variety of geographies.

More information about the POLLEN conference can be found here.