Geog 320 Political Ecology

Tutorial One

Different Engagements with Political Ecology

Tutor: Shenelle Sewell

Attending: Dr Nel

As we will be emphasising this week, political ecology is less a coherent theory than an
approach utilised by different actors and researchers. According to Robbins it is something
you do. This begs the question who are political ecologists? Who is it that does political
ecology? And of course who are we in this course? In this light this weeks tutorial will
revolve around both introducing each other and introducing the blogs of different political
ecology practitioners/groups.

Exercise 1: Icebreaker

Exercise 2: Watch and comment on a half hour segments of the Movie Darwins Nightmare
(if you are interested please watch the rest at home). Besides the movies content, which we
will discuss in the session, this section shows us that it is not only academics who do
political ecology.

Darwin's Nightmare: https://archive.org/details/Darwins.Nightmare.2004

Exercise 3 Take home assignment:

Explore and reflect, in between one and two pages on a particular Political Ecology Blog,
selected from the list below. Pick the first one that interests you, or pick one at random (any
will do) and tell us who is producing the content of the blog, what their focus is of research
and engagement, and what the link is between their work and political ecology (it might not
be direct or explicit [obvious], and if so say so). Finally tell us what interests you in the blog.

If you have an internet connection please have a quick look over and we can discuss these in
class before you leave.

Blogs/websites:

Ekosiasa - https://ekosiasa.wordpress.com/
EJOLT: http://www.ejolt.org/maps/
Water Deeply - https://www.newsdeeply.com/water/articles/
ENTITLE blog - https://entitleblog.org/
POLLEN network (blog forthcoming) - http://politicalecologynetwork.com/
IICAT BDP - http://www.iicat.org/iicat-biosphere-defense-project/
PPEL - http://ppel.arizona.edu/
CUT (UBC) - http://www.internationalreporting.org/cut/ http://journalism.ubc.ca/cut/
Steps - http://steps-centre.org/category/blog/
Zimbabweland - https://zimbabweland.wordpress.com/