was closed and transformed into the Western Signal Corps School, a radar and radio training school for the US Army. Th is article analyzes the militarized past and present at the University of California (UC) Davis through our "Militarized Arboretum Walking Tour. " Th e tour comprises multiple stops through the university's Arboretum botanical garden and central campus. By combining archival materials with situated observations on natural and built environments, participants examine how militarized and colonial systems, landscapes, and legacies impact and refl ect ordinary life beyond the spectacle of the battlefi eld or wartime. We analyze how our walking tour, as a historical geographic method, off ers participants novel ways of understanding and analyzing local and global, historical and present, issues of "everyday militarism. " We focus particularly on how the tour "unsettles" the campus environment undergraduate students encounter as a quotidian living and working space, and off er both direct student refl ections and our own pedagogical insights on walking tours as an engaged strategy to teach both the local and transnational history of US empire.
Left Coast Political Ecology (LCPE) is a network of undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and faculty engaged in a collective practice of political ecology grounded in strong connection to the "Left Coast" of North America. In this manifesto, we build on successful 2015 and 2018 workshops on the practice and value of political ecology today to communicate our origins, efforts, and ideas towards building a community of praxis amid the urgencies and uncertainties of our time. We first articulate those organizing and theoretical lineages that influence and inform our work. We trace the evolution of LCPE through diverse genealogies and cross-pollinations – from the "Berkeley School" to Black, Indigenous, feminist, and decolonial studies, through political struggles within and beyond the academy. In grappling with the challenges of our institutional histories of settler-colonial, capitalist, and racist dispossession, we then propose a "coastal epistemology", one that troubles the notion of a settler-colonial or neoliberal "frontier" while finding value in encounter, conversation, and emergence. We seek to make transparent our positions of relative privilege as well as the precarious contexts in which we work and live, while mobilizing and embodying political ecology's long-standing normative and liberatory aims. Next we share some of the diverse methodological approaches employed by our members and collective, with the aim of providing inspiration and solidarity to others contending with similar challenges. Ultimately, we suggest a vision for what a political ecology adequate to our moment might look like and require: a necessarily collective and hopeful project, amid processes of colonial violence, capitalist inequity, and climate catastrophe. The Left Coast Political Ecology network invites you to dream and organize with us, to share resources, experiences, and community, and to help push our field and our institutions toward more socially just and ecologically sustainable futures.Keywords: Coastal epistemology, Left Coast, network, radical geography, praxis, West Coast
Feminist scholars and social movements have long been important voices against war and empire. Yet the era of global “endless wars” stretches behind and before us, challenging both our longstanding intellectual theories of violence and our political strategies for combating entrenched imperialism. This essay reviews three monographs in the emergent field of “everyday militarisms,” a new direction forward for understanding and criticizing global war in the past, present, and future. Threading connections between feminist science studies, cultural studies, and women of color and transnational feminisms, these texts ask us to more closely consider how elements of war show up in ordinary formations. I highlight how these books and the field of everyday militarisms more broadly makes us question what is understood as feminist work in both theory and method, through their shared and novel feminist theories of temporality. Together they open new understandings of ongoing systemic and state violence in the world today and different political paths forward in the face of seemingly intractable conflict.
The recent proliferation of settler colonial and Indigenous studies of Palestine have addressed the historical and present-day enclosure of Palestinian land, yet the question of ‘indigeneity’ is underexamined in this literature. Claims to indigeneity in Palestine straddle varied definitions: a racial category; as constructed through the colonial encounter or preceding colonialism; and as a local relation or an international juridico-political category. Using discourse analysis and ethnography of a specific Palestinian sustainable agriculture initiative, I show how for Palestinians, claiming indigeneity brings into tension potential political economic gains, social relations of struggle, and discursive formations of collective subjectivity. A valorisation and commodification of indigeneity as a racial category narrows notions of indigeneity to the biological-cultural, offering challenges for Palestinian struggles for sovereignty. I conclude by asking what theorising from Palestine offers to Marxist theories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, and whether indigeneity can exceed its commodification.
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