Ecologies of War

Eleana Kim
Anthropology
UC Irvine

Ecologies of War is a conference that will bring thirty-four anthropologists together over three days to collectively theorize multiple entanglements of wars and ecologies. Building on an edited series, Ecologies of War (Guarasci and Kim, 2022), this conference serves as part of a larger initiative that will produce an edited volume, a publicly available, open-access methodological toolkit, a two-hour digital webinar on ethnographic praxis, a collaborative syllabus, and conference presentations over the next two years. Ecologies of War brings into focus how the material, affective, and social manifestations of war and militarization produce ecologies, which are, in turn, inextricable from the violence, toxicity, affects, and traumas of war. As the fires burning from military battles and the fires burning from climate crisis both intensify, the scholars in this collaboration bring local expertise and fine-grained ethnographic attention to sites in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas where explosive wars, perpetual wars, never-ending wars, and peacelessness of political enmity endure, creating experiential, material, affective, and ecological effects. Through the presentation of our research and guided workshops, the conference will offer a unique opportunity for collective theorization of the inextricability of war and ecologies in our contemporary world.

Image Credit: “White Mesa Burden,” Teresa Montoya, 2021