Our growing Sociology list has a global outlook featuring high-quality research across emerging and established areas in the field, such as digital sociology, migration, gender, race and ethnicity, public sociology, and children and families.
Our series include the bestselling 21st Century Standpoints, in collaboration with the British Sociological Association, and the Sociology of Diversity and Public Sociology series.
We publish leading journals in the field, including Emotions and Society in association with the European Sociological Association's (ESA) Research Network on Sociology of Emotions (RN11) as well as Families, Relationships and Societies and the Journal of Gender-Based Violence.
Sociology
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In this article and interview Sam Siva presents the work of the British Black and People of Colour collective, Land in Our Names (LION), unpacking the centrality of land reparations to any project of ecological reparation. LION’s work supports Black and People of Colour in reconnecting with land through food growing and claiming access to nature. Putting access to land at the centre of ecological justice is also about affirming the interconnectedness between ecological repair, healing and concrete reparations for damages done to people and non-humans through imperialism, colonialism and extractivism, as well as about understanding the centrality of racism to these enterprises and their persistent inheritances in the present. Together, this text and a follow-up conversation connecting the personal and the political, struggles and hopes, demonstrate the deep connection of exclusionary dynamics to contemporary concerns of justice at the heart of ecological reparation – such as climate change, the whiteness of the countryside, the rise of malnutrition and poor mental health.
Ecological Reparation engages with social-environmental degradation by attempting to rethink concepts and practices that may be needed to repair damaged ecologies and to claim reparations for persistent inequities and injustices. The volume brings together a multiplicity of original contributions of international scholars in science and technology studies, environmental studies, ecological humanities, art and design, geography, anthropology and other social sciences exploring a multiplicity of socio-ecological struggles as well as insurgent and inventive modes of conservation, mending, care and empowerment of more than human ecologies.
Microbes increasingly feature in narratives and practices of ecological repair across contexts and scales, from intimate bodily processes to expansive global systems. This chapter explores two approaches to mending damaged ecologies with microbes. First, therapeutic efforts to ‘rewild’ human microbiomes through the restoration of mutualistic microbes (hookworms and bacteria) to treat diseases of microbial absence and imbalance. Second, synthetic biology endeavours to engineer microbes to assimilate greenhouse gases and produce sustainable chemicals in circular carbon economies. Drawing on scientific, social scientific and popular literatures on helminth and faecal microbiota transplant therapies, and ethnographic engagement with synthetic biology for gas fermentation, the chapter explores what might (and might not) be afforded by ecological, multi-scalar thinking, fixing and caring in these contexts. In concluding, it explores the analytical lens of ‘ecologies of participation’ (Chilvers et al, 2018) to account – and perhaps also make space – for diverse modes of engagement with ecological reparation.
How to become a companion of the Earth by taking part in more than human communities of food? This is the open question that accompanies the making of alternative forms of living in the Genuino Clandestino network. In this chapter, I explore three key dimensions of becoming a peasant: farming ecological practices, food communities that links countryside and urban spaces and civic and collective use of land. By exploring the peasant return and its culture of eco-sharing, the development of self-organized peasant markets in Bologna and the community of Mondeggi Bene Comune, Fattoria Senza Padroni, we will scout the multiple practices of mending and ecological reparation that animate the everyday politics of Genuino Clandestino.
Environmental citizenship scholarship has pointed out liberal rights as the focus of eco-political action. However, agroecological practices in Colombia, understood as modes of ecological reparation, broaden the scope of environmental citizenship since obligation and obeying life are key. Through an ethnographic account – in the mode of empirical philosophy – this chapter conceptualizes agroecological practices as belonging to an ecology of abundance that resists the liberal humanist understanding of environmental citizenship and economies of depletion (fuelled in this case by industrial ornamental agriculture). As a consequence, obligation is practiced as a relation that is established by a place’s dynamic unfolding, foregrounding practices of ecological reparation and an ethic of abundance.
This chapter thinks from care and repair towards a worldly form of hope. Reclaiming the concept from its salvationist roots, it offers instead a deflationary account in which hope functions as an ordinary feature of being in the world – and one which deepens rather than reduces our entanglements with the nature-cultures around us. It advances several propositions. Hope is not predictive (and therefore cannot be falsified or disproved). The measure of hope is not accuracy, but efficacy: its ability to hold more meaningful forms of action in the world. Hope may be expressed in change and transformation, but also more modest forms of patience and enduring. While often called to the fore in moments of crisis and transition, hope is above all a property of ordinary work, from whence comes it depth and power. Finally, hope is a collective accomplishment – something we do together in the world, in concert with others and with things.
In this chapter I describe the practices of farmers who are rearing beef cattle exclusively on the forage of grass pastures as ‘mending ecologies’. To mend ecologies requires intimate observation of what has broken down, as well as specific spaces for experimentation, collaboration and repair. I describe how this mending, and the new ecologies that emerge as a result, involve a gradual re-materialization of the whole body of the farm, in a way that counters the mode of production of industrialized livestock agriculture. Farmer members of the Pasture Fed Livestock Association (PFLA) are deliberately making spaces for this re-materialization: their farms are accommodating new forms of attention and human labour, new multi-species interactions, and new configurations of infrastructure and expertise. Such re-arrangements are risky and fallible. But they are, at the same time, a hopeful reclamation of the socioecological fabric – part of what our editors have called the ‘unfolding, relational and inter-connected movements of ecological reparation’. As such, they brim with a new sensual repertoire – bringing new sounds, colours, textures, rhythms and emotions to the material practices of the livestock farm.
Ecological Reparation engages with social-environmental degradation by attempting to rethink concepts and practices that may be needed to repair damaged ecologies and to claim reparations for persistent inequities and injustices. The volume brings together a multiplicity of original contributions of international scholars in science and technology studies, environmental studies, ecological humanities, art and design, geography, anthropology and other social sciences exploring a multiplicity of socio-ecological struggles as well as insurgent and inventive modes of conservation, mending, care and empowerment of more than human ecologies.
When a factory shuts down, it destroys the territory at environmental, economic and social level, leaving behind an ecology of despair. Resistance is the leap from despair to repair. In this chapter, I follow the story of Ri-Maflow, a recuperated factory in the north of Italy. Repair is here understood as pairing together once again what has been separated: the workers and their factory, the factory and its territory. In this sense Ri-Maflow represents an ecology of repair: beyond and against despair and degradation, recuperating a factory means repairing the lives of despaired workers made redundant by the logic of capitalist delocalizations and limiting the damage to the environment threatened by an otherwise abandoned factory with its toxic pollutants. But it also shows the other meaning of reparation: the occupation of the warehouse becomes a form of compensation for the damage that the territory and its inhabitants have suffered.
Building on the history of technology, science, technology and society studies and environmental history, the chapter compares wind energy that is based on small-scale, local storage, and care for saving, and, on the other hand, wind energy that relies on large-scale generation, long distance transmission and profiting through consumption. This is further linked to the difference between open wind structures, which are explicit about their dependence on physical labour/agency (human and that of the rest of nature), and partially black-boxed/encased ones, which conceal it. On the grounds of this difference, ecological reparation, based as it is on a transition from consuming to saving, becomes an issue of social resistance to the technological encasement of physical agency. In the vocabulary of STS, ecological reparation is about opening technology’s black-box. To elaborate on the technological encasement/concealment of the physical, the chapter briefly points to the similarities between soft/renewable energy and analog/software computing.
