An online book launch and conversation with Professor Audra Mitchell
How do the colonial, racist and extractive roots of conservation shape global ecosystems and their futures? How can – and how are – marginalized communities around the world fighting extinction?
As global rates of plant and animal extinctions mount, anxieties about the future of the earth’s ecosystems are fueling ever more ambitious efforts at conservation. In Revenant Ecologies, Audra Mitchell argues that these responses not only ignore but also magnify powerful forms of structural violence like colonialism, racism, genocide, extractivism, ableism, and heteronormativity, ultimately contributing to the destruction of unique life forms and ecosystems. Drawing on diverse Indigenous and other marginalized knowledge systems, Revenant Ecologies offers an alternative framework—(bio)plurality—that focuses on nurturing unique, irreplaceable worlds, relations, and ecosystems, aiming to transform global ecological–political relations, including through global processes of land return, direct action against structural violence and critically confronting discourses on “human extinction.”
Professor Audra Mitchell holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Political Ecology at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the Department of Political Science, Wilfrid Laurier University. Audra’s recent work engages diverse Indigenous knowledge systems to re-frame how global patterns of plant and animal extinction are understood and addressed.
Audra will be joined by two panelists: Professor Sadiah Qureshi, Chair in Modern British History at the University of Manchester; and Dr Hugo Reinert, Associate Professor in the Cultural History of Nature, University of Oslo. A Q&A will follow, moderated by Chris Newfield, ISRF Director of Research.
This event is the thirty-fourth in the ISRF’s series of Book Launches.