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Theme: 1. Uneven Geographies, Ecologies, Technologies and Human Futures
Jueling Hu
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Gaik Cheng Khoo
University of Nottingham - Malaysia Campus, Malaysia
Jueling Hu
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Wai Liang Tham
Universiti Malaya, Malaysia
Bonnibel Rambatan
New Naratif, Indonesia
The contemporary global climate crisis underpins a profound mutation in our relation to the world (Latour, 2017). This turbulent Anthropocene manifests in rising sea levels, flooding, glacial retreats, wildfires, and tropical storms, to name some crises – meanwhile, a continued dependency on fossil fuel activity has left significant change in geologic strata (Lewis & Maslin, 2015). Recent scholarly responses have argued the need to resituate humans in ecology (Morton, 2018), to reexamine the modernist tradition of human development (Saitō, 2023), and to reaffirm multispecies worlds (van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster, 2016). Those theorisations suggest new imaginations of human-nature relationships beyond a rigid dichotomy (Haraway, 2016).
Moreover, envisioning new eco-futures across geographical and cultural locations requires that scholars recognise multiple ontological and epistemic groundings in imagining possible eco-futures (Escobar, 2020). In Southeast Asia, this means reading ongoing ecological futurist imaginaries within the specific context of this troubled time-space. It means acknowledging embedded and extant global and domestic inequalities as well as the haunted colonial legacies of modernity, where tropicality and the Orientalist gaze continue to constitute the Other (Chang, 2016).
Our panel examines the ongoing production of ecological imaginaries in Southeast Asia from three perspectives: eco-film and art making, environmental activism, and queer storytelling. To do so, we interrogate different ways of knowing and acting from three main directions:
● exploring the multisensory aspects of nature;
● discussing civil society activism in overcoming fragmentation; and
● highlighting the emancipatory potential of queer ecologies.
This approach provides voices from practitioners, including media workers, activists, and artists. By extension, it allows us to examine how ideas, knowledge, and embodied experiences pertaining to eco-futures are produced and adapted to align with or challenge state technocratic systems, posthumanist possibilities, and gender normativities. In the process, we problematise a sanitised perception of ecology and the messy way in which it fundamentally shapes our future – and in doing so, we turn our focus beyond Southeast Asia and towards the broader world. In doing so, we hope to chart a way beyond nation-states, towards thinking beyond the (post)colonial context, and offer a corrective to technocratic and capitalist approaches.
Presenter: Jueling Hu – University of Amsterdam
Presenter: Wai Liang Tham – Universiti Malaya
Presenter: Bonnibel Rambatan – New Naratif