2015 Conference

Full Presentation Panel

This session discusses the applications of political ecology to the teaching of environmental issues in various disciplines, with a specific focus on how political ecology brings critical new pedagogical tools to bear on educational spaces. The papers collectively connect political-ecological theories and approaches to teaching practice through engagement with a variety of environmental topics, including water governance, eco-labeling, citizen science, and green urban development. Panelists draw on concrete examples from their own teaching to elucidate how political-ecological theories can be interwoven with actual pedagogical practice. These examples include traditional classroom-based lessons, field trips, and community-based projects.

Teaching Political Ecology

This session discusses the applications of political ecology to the teaching of environmental issues in various disciplines, with a specific focus on how political ecology brings critical new pedagogical tools to bear on educational spaces. The papers collectively connect political-ecological theories and approaches to teaching practice through engagement with a variety of environmental topics, including water governance, eco-labeling, citizen science, and green urban development. Panelists draw on concrete examples from their own teaching to elucidate how political-ecological theories can be interwoven with actual pedagogical practice. These examples include traditional classroom-based lessons, field trips, and community-based projects.

Richard L. Wallace, Chair 

Ursinus College

rwallace@ursinus.edu

Teaching and Learning the Political Ecology of Water Through Community-Based Projects.

Michael Finewood 

Chatham University

finewood@gmail.com

This presentation discusses how political ecology brings an important, critical framing to hydro-social systems through community-based projects. As a heuristic, community-based projects provide applied student experiences that link together community needs with theoretical course content. Political ecology, as a critical lens, encourages researchers to examine the normative values embedded in processes of environmental governance, advancing a politicized understanding of environmental change that links multiple political economic scales and processes. Here I draw on two community-based project case studies where students developed green infrastructure proposals in vulnerable Pittsburgh neighborhoods. I argue that such projects not only show how communities enact strategies to meet hydro-social challenges, they also help to create community participation strategies and benefits in what is typically an expert-driven approach to water governance. Political ecology further opens up questions around equity and justice as they relate to environmental decision-making. These experiences show how students can simultaneously ‘get things done’ while maintaining an important critical edge to their work.

Confronting Landscapes of Privilege and Greening Uneven Development in the Classroom

Dr. Patrick Hurley, Ph.D. 

Ursinus College

phurley@ursinus.edu

Urban political ecologists regularly focus on the ways that social-political and political-economic struggles shape processes of urban expansion and the metabolic dynamics this expansion creates. In the process, the focus is on the ways that energy, materials, and waste are redistributed throughout urban space. Likewise, this focus often exposes the inequities in access to greenspace and other forms of restorative nature that are increasingly important to urban quality of life. At the same time, exurban political ecologists focus on the ways that changes in these metabolic processes and dynamics related to of urban out-migration reshape seemingly rural landscapes. Through the case of an Environmental Studies course on “Urbanization and Environment”, I discuss how these themes can be integrated through course exercises and discussions that develop a conceptual framework; field trips focused on urban sprawl, design, and conservation; and a civic engagement project focused on efforts at vacant lot reclamation in a “neighborhood in decline.”

Producing sustainability through eco-labels: Teaching critical social science approaches to knowledge and governance through political ecology

Dr. Laureen Elgert 

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

lelgert@wpi.edu

Political ecology can help students to critically analyze eco-labels and certifications, by offering the theoretical and empirical tools to grapple with issues of power, globalization, local livelihoods and struggles, expertise and public participation in multi-scalar processes of ‘producing’ sustainability.  Labels and certifications that denote ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ products (foods, cosmetics, buildings) and places (eco-cities, STAR communities, green cities, smart cities) are increasingly common.  Such labels are widely understood as a means of communicating information to consumers and citizens, encouraging them to ‘vote with their dollar’ and ‘vote with their feet’ for sustainability.  But such labels say more about society, politics and governance than they do about individual products and places. Some studies, for example, link eco-labels with the privatization of corporate regulation and neoliberal environmental governance (Guthman 2007, Klooster 2010).  Other studies have linked eco-labels with technocratic decision-making and the decline of environmental democracy (Elgert 2012, Silva-Castañeda 2012). Students are encouraged to think of eco-labels as technologies of knowledge production and technologies of governance in order to understand an increasingly important topic in environmental studies from a political ecological perspective.

Teaching the Political Ecology of Environmental Knowledge Production with Citizen Science

Teresa Lloro-Bidart, PhD 

California State University, Chico

tllor001@ucr.edu

The use of citizen science as a pedagogical tool in formal educational spaces has gained traction as students throughout the nation contribute data to a variety of monitoring programs, like the USA National Phenology Network’s “Nature’s Notebook” and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s “Project Feeder Watch.” While a burgeoning scholarly literature demonstrates that such projects typically aim to increase student engagement with and understanding of science, scant attention is typically given to the politicalaspects of environmental (and scientific) knowledge production. The federal government’s increasing interest in citizen science projects, as evidenced by the EPA’s “Federal Community of Practice for Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science” and NOAA’s “Citizen Science Community of Practice,” point to how citizen science is embedded in neoliberal projects of the state.  Indeed, through political-ecological analyses, Ottinger (2010a, b), Lave (2012) and Kinchy, Jalbert, and Lyons (2014) elucidate that citizen science, as a type of extramural scientific knowledge system, often becomes couched in the same neoliberal science regimes of university science, also a project of the state. I demonstrate how approaching citizen science through a political-ecological pedagogical lens can help students understand that the production of knowledge about the environment at the local, regional, and national levels, including their own contributions as “citizen scientists,” is both “political” and “ecological.”