Undisciplined Enviroments
by Ilenia Iengo
pp. 259-266 Issue 7 (4,1) – January-June 2017 ISSN (online): 2539/2239 ISSN (print): 2389-8232 DOI: 1017450/17015
Abstract
For 4 days, from the 20th to the 24th of March 2016, about 500 people among scholars, activists, and artists convened in Stockholm for Undisciplined Environments, the International Conference of the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE).
Why “undisciplined environments”? Shouldn’t society aim to discipline, control, and contain nature? Historically, this has been the main strategy through which humans have related to nature. Even more, nature has been thought through disciplines, each of them revealing as much as occluding parts of it. According to several scholars, the roots of the current ecological crisis lay precisely in the Judeo-Christian obsession to dominate nature. Although there is a continuous appeal to multi-disciplinary research and training, the ways in which knowledge is created and reproduced is deeply disciplinary/disciplined. This approach is radically inadequate to the ecological challenges our societies are facing. The environments are intrinsically undisciplined, they do not obey to humans’ desires while resisting to narrow disciplinary understandings.