PROGRAMME
The FIREPOL research team is pleased to invite you to its autumn workshop series.
Through the presentation and discussion of research conducted in different international contexts, the workshops will provide an opportunity for scientific exchange on approaches, practices, and challenges related to fire management.
All presentations will take palce at Castello del Valentino (Sala Vigliano). It will also be possible to join online via Zoom.
Please register here: info@firepol.eu
Wednesday November 28 (Zoom: https://polito-it.zoom.us/j/84334222627)
10 AM – Epistemic justice: why and how it matters for unlocking fire governance
Professor Iokiñe Rodriguez Fernandez
University of East Anglia
Abstract: Different forms of direct and cultural violence have been extensively documented across the world on fire-dependent indigenous peoples over the last 100 years. These include anti-fire repression (fines, imprisonment, displacement), anti-fire rhetoric and different policies aimed at modifying the livelihood practices of indigenous people away from the use of fire. Intrinsic to the way most fire management policies across the world have been framed is the exclusion and marginalization of local worldviews, values, governance systems and knowledge of fire.
Despite efforts to democratize knowledge and to integrate indigenous knowledge in fire management policies, epistemic domination in wildfire management continues in many parts of the world due to the strong hold that a western scientific worldview continues to have in knowledge hierarchies within the agencies and among practitioners responsible for wildfire management.
This paper draws in the concept of Epistemic Justice to discuss how decolonial research and intracultural dialogues of fire can contribute to rebalancing power dynamics in fire management. The discussion is enriched by examining three experiences from Venezuela in Canaima National Park, Mexico in Chiapas and Bolivia in Lomerio, where action-research with indigenous people about their knowledge of fire use and management has had an important part strengthening local fire governance in these three localities and in challenging dominant narratives of fire.
11 AM – From Resource Conflicts to Risk Governance: Political Ecology and Environmental Struggles in the Andean Anthropocene
PhD Vladimir R. Gil Ramón
Leverhulme Visiting Professor, University of Birmingham
Abstract: Drawing on political ecology and long-term research on socio-environmental conflicts in the Andes, this presentation reflects on the shifting dynamics of environmental governance—moving from extractive conflicts over land and minerals toward contemporary challenges of risk co-production, socio-technological disasters, and the governance of water and rivers. By bridging insights from past struggles over Andean resources with emerging frameworks on the Anthropocene, the presentation seeks to open a dialogue on the epistemological and methodological tools needed to analyze environmental politics today.
12 PM – “If you came to see fire, you came in the wrong season…”. On the political invisibility of fire in Corrientes
PhD Nicola Manghi
University of Turin
Abstract: Despite a changing productive structure that has diversified a provincial economy historically grounded largely in cattle ranching, and despite the severe wildfires that affected the region in 2022, the use of fire remains firmly embedded in the social life and economic activities of the Province of Corrientes, in the Argentine North-East. This contrasts with other Argentine provinces, where acute wildfire events have contributed to making fire an object of environmental concern and political conflict. This paper investigates the structural conditions that have enabled fire to retain this relatively uncontroversial status in Corrientes.
Thursday November 29 (Zoom: https://polito-it.zoom.us/j/81547434538)
10 AM – Reasoning Under Fire: Understanding Professional Perspectives in Fire Governance
PhD Elliot Fisher
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
11 AM – Propertied Injustices: The (ongoing) Legacies of Property and Insurance in the Context of Wildfires in British Columbia
M.A. Fabiola Melchior
The University of British Columbia
Abstract: In 1905, historian F.C. Oviatt – studying the history of fire insurance in the U.S. –
wrote that fire and marine insurance “have been part of the bone and sinew of
material prosperity of the American people” (Oviatt 1905: 156). Marine insurance, in
fact, was a relied-on financial tool in the transatlantic slave trade, pointing to the
history of insurance as racialized and rooted in anti-Blackness. Early forms of
property insurance (e.g. claims systems, relief funds, fire insurance) may also have
played a role in state-sponsored risk-hedging against Indigenous resistance
throughout the (ongoing) process of colonial expansion and occupation. Despite
insurance’s central and ongoing role in the territorial, commercial and financial
development of settler colonies, insurance has rarely been studied in the context of
settler coloniality. In more recent years, insurance has been naturalized (and
researched) as a financialized risk-hedging mechanism against climate change-
induced disasters like wildfires, and related property losses/damages in settler states
such as the U.S. or Australia. With a rapid increase in intensity and frequency of
wildfires, who can (and cannot) stay and/or rebuild post-disaster is increasingly
determined by insurance coverage – or a lack thereof. Since insurance is deeply
entangled with property (and its socio-legal creation), access to insurance – just like
access to property – has historically been racialized, gendered and colonial.
Mobilizing legal scholars Cheryl Harris’ ‘whiteness as property’ (1993) and Brenna
Bhandar’s ‘colonial lives of property’ (2018) as well as the concept of ‘real property
supremacy’ which emerged more recently from housing scholarship (Kear et al.
2023), I seek to illuminate some of the structural challenges that cause unjust
community-level access to financial and material resources for risk management,
emergency response and post-disaster recovery in wildfire contexts in so-called
British Columbia, and potentially beyond.
12 PM – Living through Fire: Fire-Enabled Goods (FEGs) across Diverse Landscapes
M.A. Greta Mazzocchi
Politecnico di Torino
