Today comes into life Undisciplined Environments – a platform for political ecology research and activism. 

With this post, we wish to inaugurate and present this novel effort by the ENTITLE Collective in collaboration with the WEGO (Well-being, Ecology, Gender and cOmmunity) project. The ENTITLE Collective is the team of scholar-activists that since 2014 has animated the ENTITLE Blog, an online outlet devoted to discuss and reflect on political ecology. In 2019, we decided to step up our ambitions and expand our horizons, and this new platform is the result of our endeavour.

Undisciplined Environments (UE) aims to become an influential crossroads for activists, researchers, journalists and anyone interested in the mutual imbrications of power, society, culture and ecology. Our commitment is to establish UE as a compelling virtual space to share ideas, stories, concepts, methods and strategies for the elaboration of the knowledges and practices needed to build more emancipatory socionatural worlds. 

For us, the heterogeneous field of political ecology provides a lively and wide-ranging set of approaches to tackle the complex relations between political processes, environmental changes and social dynamics. In our age of climate breakdown, planetary ecological crisis and re-emergence of fascist ideologies, we believe that clear analyses and informed commentaries of the current conjuncture must begin with an engagement with ongoing struggles for environmental justice & equality in a spirit of solidarity and exchange of knowledges. Therefore, we stand side-by-side and in solidarity with the thousands of people around the world fighting on the frontlines of socio-environmental conflicts for truly sustainable transitions and transformations, and we embrace a politics informed by feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist and decolonial principles.

Our editorial collective is composed of academic researchers and activists scattered across Europe and Latin America. The core group met during the ENTITLE Project, a EU-funded Initial Training Network coordinated by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and involving eight Universities, two NGOs and one Environmental consultancy. From there, the editorial group grew, and after the formal end of the project it became an independent collective. With time, we established partnerships with transnational networks – like the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN) – and with other projects – like WEGO, an Innovation Training Network funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme aimed at providing research on and for local communities engaged in building resilient, equitable and sustainable futures.

The name Undisciplined Environments is a nod to the conference with the same name organised as the last event of the ENTITLE project in 2016 in Stockholm, but it also reflects our aspiration to serve as a space to “undiscipline” political ecology, a proposal elaborated in one of our introductory essays that we will present today.

The platform you are browsing builds on, complements and expands the work initiated by the ENTITLE Blog. Besides providing access to the entire archive of posts from the previous blog, we will continue writing, gathering, editing and publishing original contributions from researchers, practitioners, activists, artists and storytellers that tackle critically the co-constitution of social and environmental processes. 

Undisciplined Environments brings several novelties. We have added a new section – Longer Reads – dedicated to more elaborate and expanded texts on political ecology and environmental humanities. We have reorganized categories, now divided in Short essays, Resources, Art & multimedia, Events & calls, Reviews, and Interviews. We have also organized our Series of essays (interlinked posts that speak to a common theme) in a separate tab, hoping to animate more blog-based discussions and debates. We also aspire to grow our collection of posts in the future with podcasts, videos, and more multimedia content, so stay tuned!

As before, this platform relies on the writing and gathering work of the editorial collective and, crucially, on the contributions from our readers. Please consider sending proposals for any of the category of posts by writing to: undisciplinedenvironments@gmail.com after checking our posting guide. 

We hope you enjoy reading these contributions, and look forward to engaging with all of you in collectively building this digital space of political ecology praxis.

With best wishes and in solidarity,

The Editorial Collective