Papers by Padini Nirmal
Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 2022
In times of devastating ecological crisis, where can we find a route map to collectively halt cur... more In times of devastating ecological crisis, where can we find a route map to collectively halt current trends of destruction? In this review, we exam- ine feminist studies’ recent contributions to activism and theorizing regard- ing extraction, emerging ecologies, and multispecies justice. By bringing in salient research from the fields of feminist political ecology, ecofeminism, and decolonial/anticolonial feminisms, we point to the ways in which femi- nist thought and action has opened up spaces for recognizing, envisioning, and making life-affirming ecologies rather than extractive systems of de- struction. We refer to the former as emergent and emancipatory ecologies, that is, ecologies always in the process of becoming and capable of defying and subverting oppression based on gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, caste, ability, species and other forms of discrimination—and, thus, capable of protecting and defending life and living worlds.
A Research Agenda for Animal Geographies, 2021
We propose a feminist research agenda for animal geographies informed by critical race, decolonia... more We propose a feminist research agenda for animal geographies informed by critical race, decolonial, ecofeminist, and other radical theories. We set four intertwined questions: why and how are those oppressions that produce inequity and injustice interlinked? How do we define and enact a multispecies justice without privileging or ranking oppressions? What would be the terms of a non-hierarchical relationship between humans and other animals? How might we conceive the terms of the process of multispecies flourishing and justice? After briefly considering this “template” for moving toward a multispecies justice, we apply the template to an important area of human-animal relations: food systems. Finally, speaking as feminist scholar-activists concerned with realizing multispecies justice to effectively address the complex socio-ecological emergency wrought by global capitalism, we propose future research focus centrally on policy change, targeting the systemic core of oppressive institutions and their production of subjectivities.
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2018
Rooted networks provide a conceptual framework that embeds network thinking in nature-society geo... more Rooted networks provide a conceptual framework that embeds network thinking in nature-society geography in order to investigate socio-ecological relations, while emphasizing the place-specific materiality of these relations. This progress report examines how geographers have put the framework into scholarly practice. The conceptual approach has enabled researchers to: 1) articulate the territoriality and materiality of networks as assemblages, which may be simultaneously rooted and mobile; 2) discern diverse types of power that flow through network connections; and 3) conduct analyses that unearth multiply-situated knowledges within networks. Challenges emerge as we seek to integrate the approach more fully with disciplinary traditions, including organizing complex relationships into bounded scholarly formats; choosing which aspects of the network are most salient to Putting Rooted Networks into Practice 960 analyze; and illustrating networks for effective communication. We describe...
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2020
The relationship between nature as ecological place and people as social, political, cultural (et... more The relationship between nature as ecological place and people as social, political, cultural (etc.) beings has been a central concern within the field of human geography. A critical dimension within this broader field of concern pertains to the relationship between nature as ecological place, and gender, as a structuring force within the social, cultural, economic, political lives of humans. Focusing on the ways in which gender intersects with race, class, coloniality, sexuality, age, nationality, and caste (among other identities) illuminates how such identities structure human relations with nature. As a terrain of ecological and social relations, nature is political and becomes politicized through particular sociohistorical processes.
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies , 2018
Rooted networks provide a conceptual framework that embeds network thinking in nature-society geo... more Rooted networks provide a conceptual framework that embeds network thinking in nature-society geography in order to investigate socio-ecological relations, while emphasizing the place-specific materiality of these relations. This progress report examines how geographers have put the framework into scholarly practice. The conceptual approach has enabled researchers to: 1) articulate the territoriality and materiality of networks as assemblages, which may be simultaneously rooted and mobile; 2) discern diverse types of power that flow through network connections; and 3) conduct analyses that unearth multiply-situated knowledges within networks. Challenges emerge as we seek to integrate the approach more fully with disciplinary traditions, including organizing complex relationships into bounded scholarly formats; choosing which aspects of the network are most salient to analyze; and illustrating networks for effective communication. We describe the ways in which rooted networks can be used as a tool for action, as a pedagogical guide, and to strengthen collective capacity to imagine and negotiate alternative futures based on ‘seeing multiple.’ Finally, we call for geographers and other scholars, researchers and activists to build upon a rooted networks framework as a tool for design, analysis, understanding and communication in the search for more socially just and ecologically viable futures.
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2019
A growing coalition of degrowth scholar-activist(s) seeks to transform degrowth into an interdisc... more A growing coalition of degrowth scholar-activist(s) seeks to transform degrowth into an interdisciplinary and international field bridging a rising network of social and environmental justice movements. We offer constructive decolonial and feminist critiques to foster their productive alliances with multiple feminisms, Indigenous, post-development and pluriversal thought and design (Escobar, 2018), and people on the ground. Our suggested pathway of decolonial transition includes re-situating degrowth relative to the global south and to Indigenous and other resistance movements. We see this decolonial degrowth as a profoundly material strategy of recovery, renewal, and resistance (resurgence) through practices of re-rooting and re-commoning. To illustrate what we mean by resurgence we draw from two examples where people are engaged in ongoing struggles to protect their territories from the impacts of rampant growth—Zapatista and allied Indigenous groups in Mexico, and three Adivasi communities in the Attappady region of southern India. They are building economies and ecologies of resurgence and simultaneous resistance to growth by deterritorialization. We argue that a decolonized degrowth must be what the growth paradigm is not, and imagine what does not yet exist: our separate and collective socio-ecological futures of sufficiency and celebration in the multiple worlds of the pluriverse. Together, the two cases demonstrate pathways to autonomy, sufficiency, and resurgence of territories and worlds, through persistence, innovation, and mobilization of traditional and new knowledges. We offer these as teachers for the transition to decolonial degrowth.
In this paper, I place both the methodological and epistemological realms of my doctoral research... more In this paper, I place both the methodological and epistemological realms of my doctoral research with the Adivasis (indigenous peoples) of Attappady, Kerala under a queer decolonial feminist lens in order to better understand the nature of contemporary Adivasi indigeneity, and indigenous resistance. Given Kerala's unique position within India as a communist state, often acting in the interest of global capitalism by implementing neoliberal polices and steering state-led development plans, its Adivasis are already queer in their relationship to the state as " non-modern others ". In order to understand the often contradictory and complex relationship of the Adivasi with the communist-neoliberal state, beyond being the " marginal other " , I mobilize a queer decolonial feminist framework, through a process I term queering. I use queering to critically examine and analyze contemporary indigeneity and indigenous resistance in two stages. Firstly, through
Dianne Rocheleau's theory of rooted networks illuminates a discordant truthdespite the abstractio... more Dianne Rocheleau's theory of rooted networks illuminates a discordant truthdespite the abstractions made central through centuries of Euromodernity, there continues to be a material interdependence between people, place and other entities that is fundamentally responsible for the building and continuation of what is often referred to as 'living worlds'. Rocheleau reminds us that the worlds we inhabit are indeed alive (as living worlds of animate and inanimate beings), and that networks are not floating threads of connection but are in fact rooted in place and central to the livingness of worlds.
The popular understanding of culture in mid-twentieth-century America and Europe was arguably the... more The popular understanding of culture in mid-twentieth-century America and Europe was arguably the symphony orchestra, the ballet, the art museum, and a "national" white, elite etiquette dictating, and explaining, how people should behave. Since the mid-1960s, we have witnessed the production and recognition of a proliferation of "cultures" and "multiculturalisms" within popular culture and informal political and economic institutions.
Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements, 2015
Workshops Co-Organised by Padini Nirmal
In this (the first part of a) two-part workspace, a collective of interdisciplinary scholars will... more In this (the first part of a) two-part workspace, a collective of interdisciplinary scholars will come together to deliberate on and practice new modes of communicative praxis in academic conference/workshops. This workspace builds upon energies to decolonize university spaces, including during a previous workshop, Setting Forth At Dawn: A Workshop on the Geopolitics and Practices of Academic Writing, held in May 2016 at Jimma University in Jimma, Ethiopia.
In traditional academic conferences, scholars are subject to rigid time and space controls that often privilege more positivist and axiomatic research topics and knowledge(s). These academic spaces often reaffirm a spatial and metaphysical distancing between the “audience” (learners) and the “presenter” (the knower). This enforced distancing can re-privilege and re-center the “presenter.” This re-privileging can be particularly problematic for scholars whose works contribute to projects of decolonizing and/or are critical of the relationship(s) between knowledge and power. Moreover, traditional conference modes of communicative praxis can de-privilege (a) hesitancy, (b) the expression of multiple subjectivities, and (c) highly transdisciplinary scholarships. This is perhaps more acute for emerging, independent, and non-affiliated scholars, whom have yet to achieve the renown, prestige, and/or job security of tenured and highly published scholars. In such settings, scholars attempt transformative expressions through clandestine and often dis-unified formulas, oftentimes at the fringes of academic conferences.
Through guided discussions, interactive and embodied sessions, we will address the structural and epistemological legacies of colonialism within our universities as we continue to foster the energies of decolonization, with an attention to concrete practices of decolonization.
Thesis Chapters by Padini Nirmal
Teaching Documents by Padini Nirmal
State of the Planet, 2019
By Padini Nirmal By Padini Nirmal Janet* makes five dollars a day selling tomatoes on the street.... more By Padini Nirmal By Padini Nirmal Janet* makes five dollars a day selling tomatoes on the street. That is all the money she has to feed herself and her family. It is the money that pays for her children's education, for her family's healthcare and for the upkeep of their small home. Today, there isn't a cloud in the sky. The streets echo a resounding silence. There is no laughter, no sound, not a soul around, not even a pair of slow-moving legs as far as the eye can see. A decapitated head skewered on a stick is the only morbidly lifeless sign of life. This isn't the beginning of a zombie novel. There is no apocalypse to witness. As Christelle Bay, founder and executive director of Hope for the Needy Association (HOFNA) recounts, this is just a regular Monday in the two English-speaking regions of Cameroon. Thanks to a dark colonial history fraught with tensions between the French
Uploads
Papers by Padini Nirmal
Workshops Co-Organised by Padini Nirmal
In traditional academic conferences, scholars are subject to rigid time and space controls that often privilege more positivist and axiomatic research topics and knowledge(s). These academic spaces often reaffirm a spatial and metaphysical distancing between the “audience” (learners) and the “presenter” (the knower). This enforced distancing can re-privilege and re-center the “presenter.” This re-privileging can be particularly problematic for scholars whose works contribute to projects of decolonizing and/or are critical of the relationship(s) between knowledge and power. Moreover, traditional conference modes of communicative praxis can de-privilege (a) hesitancy, (b) the expression of multiple subjectivities, and (c) highly transdisciplinary scholarships. This is perhaps more acute for emerging, independent, and non-affiliated scholars, whom have yet to achieve the renown, prestige, and/or job security of tenured and highly published scholars. In such settings, scholars attempt transformative expressions through clandestine and often dis-unified formulas, oftentimes at the fringes of academic conferences.
Through guided discussions, interactive and embodied sessions, we will address the structural and epistemological legacies of colonialism within our universities as we continue to foster the energies of decolonization, with an attention to concrete practices of decolonization.
Thesis Chapters by Padini Nirmal
Teaching Documents by Padini Nirmal
In traditional academic conferences, scholars are subject to rigid time and space controls that often privilege more positivist and axiomatic research topics and knowledge(s). These academic spaces often reaffirm a spatial and metaphysical distancing between the “audience” (learners) and the “presenter” (the knower). This enforced distancing can re-privilege and re-center the “presenter.” This re-privileging can be particularly problematic for scholars whose works contribute to projects of decolonizing and/or are critical of the relationship(s) between knowledge and power. Moreover, traditional conference modes of communicative praxis can de-privilege (a) hesitancy, (b) the expression of multiple subjectivities, and (c) highly transdisciplinary scholarships. This is perhaps more acute for emerging, independent, and non-affiliated scholars, whom have yet to achieve the renown, prestige, and/or job security of tenured and highly published scholars. In such settings, scholars attempt transformative expressions through clandestine and often dis-unified formulas, oftentimes at the fringes of academic conferences.
Through guided discussions, interactive and embodied sessions, we will address the structural and epistemological legacies of colonialism within our universities as we continue to foster the energies of decolonization, with an attention to concrete practices of decolonization.