Socioecological Transformations : Linking Ontologies with Structures, Personal with Collective Change

Abstract

Socioecological Transformations confronts dominant framings of transformation that either remain apolitical and ahistorical, or overemphasizes the structural causes, while bypassing the ontological roots of the present-day socioecological violence and destruction. It challenges the technocratic and structuralist tendencies that either reduce transformation to policy tweaks, or to social movements and activism. This volume reclaims socioecological transformations as a radical, justice-centred theory-praxis. By connecting the structural and the ontological roots of the colonial-racial-capitalist system of oppression, the book exposes how materialist-dualist ontology and associated worldviews uphold hierarchies of worth, which in turn serve and uphold the colonial-racial-capitalist system of oppression. In doing so, it widens the spectrum of viable responses to include in addition to social movements and activism, those that unsettle the ontological bases of our socioecological calamities—the human exceptionalism and the illusion of separation. The fifteen chapters span diverse geographies, struggles, and approaches, weaving together onto-epistemic inquiry with grounded transformative practices, movements and action. The contributions share the common focus on justice as both motivation and a guiding principle for transformations. The book calls for transformation where being, knowing, and doing are reimagined in relational, life-affirming terms. A vital resource for students, academics, activists inspired by political ecology, feminist studies, decolonial and relational approaches, social movements, and transformations, but also practitioners and policy actors seeking to engage transformation beyond surface-level solutions. Socioecological Transformations invites readers to embrace complexity, plurality, along the paradoxes that transformations entail, while building solidarities across polarized strategies, ontologies and worldviews. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.