Bjørn Sletto

We Drew What We Imagined : Participatory Mapping, Performance, and the Arts of Landscape Making

Participatory mapping has emerged as a dominant paradigm in participatory approaches to international planning, conservation management, and community development in the Global South and is considered a technology with emancipatory potentials for subordinate or marginalized groups. However, the literature on community‐based mapping has been criticized for its dualistic approach to power, culture, and the local and for reifying material and discursive forms of domination operating through Western projects such as development and global environmentalism. An ethnographic engagement with mapping projects conducted in Trinidad in the fall of 1998 and in Venezuela from 2001–2004 provides a deeper understanding of participatory‐mapping workshops as theaters for the performance and negotiation of identities, reflecting the complex articulations between global, political‐economic processes and desires for place and belonging. Ultimately, this critical reading indicates an urgent need for greater reflexivity in the application of participatory‐mapping approaches.

Educating Reflective Practitioners: Learning to Embrace the Unexpected through Service Learning

Service learning projects are characterized by complex processes of knowledge production, which are contingent on narratives that inform the identities of educators, students, and community members. By encouraging students to critically reflect on their positionality and the social processes that inform such coproduction of knowledge, educators can use service learning to educate reflective practitioners capable of working productively with multiple actors. In a service learning course focusing on environmental justice at the University of Texas at Austin, students worked with a variety of community partners to document children’s knowledge of environmental hazards, reflecting critically on unexpected challenges during their fieldwork.

Producing space(s), representing landscapes: maps and resource conflicts in Trinidad

In the mid-1990s Trinidadians witnessed a hotly contested resource conflict in the Nariva Swamp, a wetland located on the east coast of the island. This conflict resulted in a stricter regime of environmental protection and greater influence of conservation-oriented government agencies, and demonstrates the role of representations in influencing spatial practice. Drawing on the critical landscape literature, post-structural political ecology and the work of Henri Lefebvre, this article views landscapes as visualized dimensions of space, produced in accordance with specific ideologies and material priorities. In this case, linkages between hegemonic discourses on nature and conceptualizations of local practices lent the power of ‘representation of space’ to conservationiosts fighting to evict commercial rice growers from the wetlands. These hegemonic representations were refracted and reformulated by swamp dwellers, who conceptualized their everyday practices through verbal and cartographic counter-representations.

Boundary Making and Regional Identities in a Globalized Environment: Reordering the Nariva Swamp, Trinidad

The recent work in critical geopolitics problematizes the notion of boundaries and interrogates the narratives, ideologies, and institutions that inform processes of boundary making, or ‘reborderings’. From the perspective of critical geopolitics, boundary making for conservation purposes is understood as an act of power embedded within a discourse of environmental geopolitics. Through reborderings, environmental geopolitics thus reflects and informs everyday practices and relations of power between local, state, and international actors. In this paper I illustrate a process of rebordering in Trinidad, the West Indies, in which local, state, and international actors engaged in a contest to define conservation boundaries and produce bounded identities within the Nariva Swamp. Rebordering in the Nariva Swamp reflected and influenced state and local practices in complex ways, altered relations of power on multiple levels, and led to the production of a bounded space that is simultaneously local and global.

Insurgent Planning and Its Interlocutors Studio Pedagogy as Unsanctioned Practice in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

International service learning is shaped by complex and shifting relationships between different actors with different, sometimes conflicting interests. Especially in Latin America, practice, pedagogy, and politics are intimately entangled, which means that field-oriented pedagogy cannot be neatly separated from its professional and political context. This makes it particularly important to consider the role of students and educators in reinforcing or altering hegemonic relations of power. Service learning projects are often incorporated into existing structures of engagement, but by developing new relationships and ways of speaking in invented spaces, such pedagogy may serve to further insurgent planning practices.

Burning, fire prevention and landscape productions among the Pemon, Gran Sabana, Venezuela: toward an intercultural approach to wildland fire management in Neotropical Savannas.

Wildland fire management in savanna landscapes increasingly incorporates indigenous knowledge to pursue strategies of controlled, prescriptive burning to control fuel loads. However, such participatory approaches are fraught with challenges because of contrasting views on the role of fire and the practices of prescribed burning between indigenous and state fire managers. Also, indigenous and state systems of knowledge and meanings associated with fire are not monolithic but instead characterized by conflicts and inconsistencies, which require new, communicative strategies in order to develop successful, intercultural approaches to fire management. This paper is based on long-term research on indigenous Pemon social constructs, rules and regulations regarding fire use, and traditional system of prescribed burning in the Gran Sabana, Venezuela. The authors review factors that act as constraints against successful intercultural fire management in the Gran Sabana, including conflicting perspectives on fire use within state agencies and in indigenous communities, and propose strategies for research and communicative planning to guide future efforts for more participatory and effective fire management.

Speaking of Fire: Reflexive Governance in Landscapes of Social Change and Shifting Local Identities

ABSTRACT The concept of reflexive governance has to a large extent emerged from an increasing recognition of the need to consider different meanings of nature in the environmental policy-making process. Yet, so far, little attention has been paid to creating conditions for reflexive governance among different actors in intercultural settings, particularly in the context of environmental conflict and strong cultural change among indigenous peoples. This paper reviews three participatory research projects carried out in the Gran Sabana in Canaima National Park, Venezuela, which facilitated dialogue among indigenous people regarding their conflicting views of fire, in part by developing community-wide critical reflections on processes of cultural change and identity formations. These experiences suggest that once marginalized environmental knowledge is publicly acknowledged within the context of endogenous cultural processes, indigenous people feel more confident to engage in dialogue with other actors, thus allowing the emergence of reflexive environmental governance.

The Mythical Forest, the Becoming-Desert: Environmental Knowledge Production and the Iconography of Destruction in the Gran Sabana, Venezuela

Landscape managers increasingly draw on indigenous practices of controlled burning to develop vegetation heterogeneity and reduce fuel loads, thereby avoiding extensive and destructive fires. However, anthropogenic fire is also commonly represented as a primary driver of environmental change, which in some places has led to an emphasis on heavy-handed fire suppression rather than fire management. These contradictions in global fire management are an example of the complex articulations between the social production of tropical landscapes and the processes of environmental knowledge production. This article draws on constructivist approaches in political ecology and Lacanian psychoanalysis to analyze a conflict between state agencies and indigenous people surrounding fire management in the Gran Sabana, Venezuela. Iconic features of this cultural landscape operate as signifiers in institutional discourse, informing the ways in which environmental knowledge is appropriated and produced and in turn shaping the subjectivities and practices of state fire managers.

Inclusions, erasures and emergences in an indigenous landscape: Participatory cartographies and the makings of affective place in the Sierra de Perijá, Venezuela

The post-representational critique in critical cartography has conceptualized maps as ontologically unstable, subject to re-makings through performative engagements between the map artifact, map makers, and map consumers. This insight has important implications for participatory cartographies, that is, the sorts of mapping projects which, through strategies of inclusion of indigenous spatialities erased from official maps, aim to produce counter-representations of indigenous landscapes which may serve political and emancipatory goals. Such participatory mapping practices have been critiqued for their own erasures, as meaningful, affective places are subsumed within Cartesian grids. However, an ethnographic study of a participatory mapping project in Yukpa indigenous territory in the Sierra de Perijá, Venezuela, suggests that such maps are not secure representations despite erasures of affective space. Instead, they are emergent mappings subject to the agency of performance.

The liminality of open space and rhythms of the everyday in Jallah Town, Monrovia, Liberia

Recent work in African urbanism conceptualises the African city as a metropolis in flux characterised by interconnected mobilities and heterogeneity, in contrast with the dichotomous construction of public versus private space common in development and planning discourse. Instead, open spaces are not purely private nor merely public but can be understood as liminal spaces, produced through the mobilities and rhythms that are constitutive of this urbanity in flux. A fine-grained study of activities and movements in such liminal urban space in the informal settlement of Jallah Town, Monrovia, Liberia, conducted over the course of two months in 2013, suggests that open spaces in this settlement are both heterogeneous and unstable, traced by fluctuating and porous boundaries between complex spatialities that serve multiple, age- and gender-contingent roles. By incorporating GIS-based spatial analysis with rhythmanalysis informed by phenomenological methods, these spatialities emerge as purposefully developed by residents and central to the reproduction of mobilities, rhythms and social networks constitutive of African urbanism. Such fine-grained analysis, in turn, serves to inform democratic and situated urban design and planning practices, especially in informal communities typically dismissed as irregular and illegal.