In my habilitation project, I scrutinize from a feminist-postcolonial perspective whether and how in socio-ecological conflicts transformative knowledge about alternative practices of coexistence and concepts for reconciling ecological and socio-cultural social transformation are articulated. My focus is on how these concepts are translated and disseminated into other social worlds.
The starting point of my research is the observation that in socio-ecological conflicts over extractive projects not only are questions of resource distribution negotiated, but also the extractive foundations of modernity are questioned and other human-nature relationships are articulated. While the hegemonic „extractive logic“ makes the imagination of post-extractive alternatives in the global North and in the urban centres of the global South more difficult, postcolonial approaches point to the existence of other forms of knowledge and living together on the margins of modernity, which potentially provide transformation knowledge for more socio-ecologically compatible forms of coexistence. The question is whether and how these mostly local knowledges and practices can be translated into other social worlds.
I examine not only the alternatives generated per se, but also the dynamics of their emergence in the context of the meeting of different social worlds: Based on the fact that, in socio-ecological conflicts, very heterogeneous actors – indigenous and peasant movements, urban collectives, western NGOs and state institutions – meet, I examine how these worlds of experience converge into shared knowledge.
My research perspective is shaped by the work of postcolonial feminism; I am particularly interested in questions of marginalization, exclusion and (self-)empowerment as well as the possibilities of dialogue between heterogeneous actors.
The project contributes to the debate on other forms of conviviality that recognize not only the cultural but also the ontological difference of the existing partially connected heterogeneous social worlds and takes a critical perspective on normalized power structures and the potentialities of resistance.