Seminar: "The Socio-ecological Question and the Antisystemic Environmentalism", by Dr Zehra Yasin

Dr. Zehra YAŞIN, researcher at the Social Sciences University of Ankara, Turkey, will be at ICTA-UAB to give a seminar.
 

Title: “The Socio-ecological Question and the Antisystemic Environmentalism”

Speaker: Dr. Zehra YAŞIN, researcher at the Social Sciences University of Ankara, Turkey
 

Date: Friday November 4th 2022
Time: 11-12.30h. 
Venue: Sala Antoni Rosell (Z/022 - Z/023) ICTA-UAB
 

This seminar explores a new perspective to the understanding of the 21^st century global environmental crisis through the notion of the socio-ecological question and its relationship between the global wave of environmental justice movements. It underscores the historical shift from the social question of the 19^th and 20^th centuries which was understood through the value theory of labor to the socio-ecological question as the predominating question of the contemporary temporality of the capitalist world that is understood through the conceptual perspective of value theory of nature. It specifies this historical shift based on an epistemic shift from labor rationality to environmental rationality. It specifies the global rise and spread of environmental justice movements as a manifestation of the socio-ecological question in the form of social action with two central arguments: i) we can understand the current phase of anti-systemic movements predominantly through the globally expanding forms of resistance centered on environment, food, climate, soil, water and so on as a collective socio-ecological critique and confrontation of the global capitalist relations of production; ii) we can conceptually specify the global environmental justice movement through the notion of antisystemic environmentalism expressing “the second contradiction of capitalism”, i.e. the socio-ecological crisis of the capitalist world system. Through the lens of the value of nature, it opens a critical interdisciplinary space crosscutting political economy and political ecology for rethinking the concept of class, class conflict and antisystemic environmentalism.

Bio
Zehra Taşdemir Yaşın is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology in Social Sciences University of Ankara. She received her PhD in Sociology from the State University of New York at Binghamton. She has also worked as a Development Specialist in Ankara Regional Development Agency with a focus on rural development, rural-urban integration, small peasant agriculture, urban farming, and permaculture. Her research covers the historical formation of the Mosul oil frontier and the socio-ecology of oil, the environmental movements in Turkey, global socio-ecological/agro-ecological transformation, global extractivism, the global environmental justice movement, and the relationship between nation-state formation and capitalist development in the oil-producing Middle East. She published in the Journal of Historical Sociology and the Journal of Peasant Studies. Her work titled ‘Contextualizing the Rise of Environmental Movements in Turkey: Two Instances of Anti-Gold Mining Resistance’ appeared in the book titled Transforming Socio – Natures in Turkey: Landscapes, State and Environmental Movements published by Routledge. Her last work was published by the Journal of Peasant Studies, titled “The environmentalization of the agrarian question and the agrarianization of the climate justice movement”. Her work with a title of “The socio-ecological question, the global environmental justice movement and antisystemic environmentalism” is forthcoming at a special issue of Perspectives on Global Development and Technology (Brill Publishers, 2023). She is currently working on two book proposals, tentatively titled as “The socio-ecological question and antisystemic environmentalism” and “The Social-Ecology of Oil: The Production of an Extractive Frontier in Mosul, 1900-1958”.

 

 

 

 

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