Political ecology (PE) addresses how power relations shape nature-society systems, complicate the binary between nature and culture, and understand and critique dominant forms of knowledge production and representation about human-nature entanglements. Political ecology has grown into a diverse field that attends to how power, representation, and knowledge production shape understandings of and interventions into nature-society systems. To this end, the Political Ecology Lab at UC Davis fosters collaborative projects addressing unequal power dynamics that cause and emerge from socio-environmental relations and changes. Through our collaboration, members imagine new possibilities on how to achieve a just world for humans and non-humans alike.
We conceive of our Lab as a place where disciplines like human geography, anthropology, and the environmental humanities converge. While we continue to explore what political ecology can and should mean at UC Davis, we intend to engage with relations between political ecologies and ontologies that both disagree and overlap, focusing on the emerging regional peculiarities of Northern California and on our obligations within the public university. We are critical of the limits of academic scholarship in enacting material change and we see our Lab as an opportunity to do political ecology in useful and applicable ways. As such, we are interested in expanding our scope to include creative ways of translating and communicating our scholarship to reach wider audiences, with the goal to influence changes in policy and shifting power relations.
