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Short Abstract
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We marginalize mundane and underappreciated environmental labourers and deprecate their knowledge when we fail to recognize both (1) their physical and infrastructural contributions and (2) their status as repositories of crucial environmental resilience knowledge. This panel focuses on how, why, and by what depictions formal, informal, and mundane environmental resilience labourers’ contributions to collective resilience is deprecated, and how it might be revalorized in efforts to create a sustainable future and achieve social justice.
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Long Abstract
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Environmental risks are magnified by their portrayal as uniformly affecting the entire human population – regardless of class, caste, gender, racial, legal, or other social fission lines. The spill-over of risks into social systems is redoubled when marginalized people’s environmentally critical, yet apparently mundane labour is discounted, deprecated, rendered invisible or externalized. That is despite such labour arguably being the backbone of much tangible resilience. Often, therefore, any retelling of formal and informal labourers’ resilience work narratives is invisibilized by the fact that their original narrators’ labour practices and their underlying knowledge are appropriated through inadvertent and/or deliberate extractivist systems; and they are simultaneously systemically disenfranchised, dispossessed, and deprecated. This panel calls for papers that focus ethnographically and historically on this form of devaluation of informal environmental resilience labour. The aim is both to reveal the politics, practices, and philosophies of such informal environmental labour, in the past, present, and future, as well as to revalorise that labour. The panel’s ultimate goals are (i) to ask how depictions of environmental resilience labourers can deliberately be challenged in order to reconstitute those labourers’ agency as trailblazers in alternative and viable forms of production and labour for a sustainable future; and (ii) to demonstrate that failure to account for the invisible environmental resilience labour inherent within sustainability solutions means that social justice is neither served nor a viable reality.
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