Translating Fiery Landscapes: Boundary-Work, Discourse and Economies of Attention in the Work of Fire Ecologists

• In Event: Ecosystems, Ecology, and the Boundaries of Life

Abstract

What can fire teach us about the boundaries of ecosystems, the categories of life, non-life, the ones worthy of salvaging and those deemed disposable within diverse ecological contexts? This paper seeks to elucidate the ways in which fire ecologists and their various interlocutors, including policymakers, firefighters, and the public at large contend with shifting relationships with ecologies in the context of both wildfires and prescribed burns. Based on an ethnography in progress studying fire ecologists who are liaising with different publics, this paper will show how they translate the landscape and the phenomenon of fire as part of an ongoing negotiation between not simply the categories of life and non-life but also the cultural and material ingredients of such demarcations and the kind of boundary work in motion through such processes of research and translation. I will explore how the ecosystems and the definitions thereof are curated for specific aims rooted in interests of capitalism, settler colonialism and various kinds of environmental extractions and implicated in a particular notion of security. Moreover, I will show how the fundamental knowledge claims of fire ecology are translated across different material and sociocultural landscapes. This articulation of fire ecology in situated contexts will offer a central lens by which to consider broader definitions around ecosystems, boundaries, separations in the academic study of ecology, and the extent to which economies of attention, rooted in capitalist settler-colonial assumptions, predicate such fundamental definitions.

Author

• Aadita Chaudhury, York University