Political Ecospatiality: Livelihood, Environment and Subaltern Struggles

Political Ecospatiality offers a new perspective on subaltern struggles and raises the issue of how people with limited lobbying power can still organise to defend their honour or livelihood-environmental ecospatial systems. The book narrates and analyses the historical and contemporary situations that shape and reshape the strategies and practices of larger livelihood-environmental and identity politics in Kerala by drawing parallels from the rest of India and the global South. By employing Kerala as an example, it engages with and broadens debates in political economy, political ecology, and subaltern politics. The book moves through six ecospatial conflicts and assembles three key ideas – transverse solidarity, epistemological coalescence, and subaltern modernity – and applies them as analytical tools to form an overall framework of political ecospatiality.

K. Ravi Raman is currently a member of the State Planning Board, Government of Kerala. He is the author of Global Capital and Peripheral Labour (Routledge, 2010b/2012/2015), editor of Development, Democracy and the State (Routledge, 2010) and Corporate Social Responsibility (with Ronnie Lipschutz) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).