The Political Ecology Network calls for proposals for the IV Political Ecology Meeting, under the motto “Territories and Resistance”, which will take place on 23 and 24 May in Coimbra, and 30 and 31 May in Lisbon.

The frontiers of capitalism are advancing and increasing the search for new territories for the accumulation of wealth and power. Faced with the destruction of territories and their human and non-human communities, we see a pluriverse of resistances emerging in defence of life. From the villages of Barroso against the mines, to the Alentejo against the siege of monocultures, to the struggles for housing and against police violence in the cities, people are resisting predatory extractivism and trying to make their territories live. From these and other struggles, maxims emerge about the centrality of territory as a concept and practice. We are told that “territory is dignity, and that is priceless” or that “territory is life, and life is not sold, it is loved and defended”, suggesting that territory goes beyond its hegemonic assumption.

In this meeting, we seek to challenge and confront the dominant narratives and practises of territory as ‘property’ or a ‘resource’ to be controlled, colonised, developed, exploited and sacrificed. Looking at territories as a geo-political-economic space allows us to understand the extractive dynamics of capitalism, while at the same time enabling us to advance alternative understandings and practices of/about/with territories. We want to look at territory(ies) as places of collective organisation and resistance, as a way of recreating culture and the relationship between people and the non-human ecologies that sustain them. Terrestrial, rural and urban territories, but also maritime (‘maretorio’), digital, virtual and ideological territories. Territory not as a physical space outside of us, but as a body that connects experiences - as well as violence - between our surroundings and our being. We also seek to understand the different forms of resistance, human and non-human, their ‘ecology’ (how they interact with each other), reflections on territoriality, and the possibilities of their becoming forms of re-existence, of making territories of life, of creating new utopias and possible futures. In addition, we also want to understand the territories of violence, of re-patriacalisation and re-colonisation and the multiple contexts of the production of absences from these resistances, in a context of the exhaustion of body-territories. Our intention is not to essentialise the territory as the preferred scale of analysis and political action, but to expand our own understanding of what a territory is - its relevance, limitations, contradictions and potential for political-ecological resistances and re-existences.

The meeting is organised by an emerging collective of groups and individuals from the Political Ecology Network, and aspires to be a territory for feeling, thinking and acting together to exchange knowledge and foster collaborations and synergies between territories, movements, struggles and resistances, inside and outside academia, including activists and local communities. To this end, we call for a diversity of proposals from academics, artists, civic organisations and social movements. We encourage the presentation of papers, workshops, talks, visual arts, performance and other creative interventions.

At the same time, we propose integrating the meeting into a larger agenda of events that are or will be taking place in Portugal, in order to interconnect and expand the temporal and spatial territory of political ecology. So if you're organising an event to take place between January and May 2025, send us the information so we can publicise it as part of the Political Ecology Days.

You can submit proposals and register (free of charge) for the event HERE