Socioecological Transformations - Linking Ontologies with Structures, Personal with Collective Change

Discusses how the overemphasis on structures/ structural violence often precludes any meaningful and deeper engagement with the ontological and epistemic assumptions that legitimize and discursively enable structural violence.

Socioecological Transformations opens up the urgently needed conversation on the ontological underpinnings of the colonial-racial-capitalist system that drives both human and ecological destruction. (Page 0)

This book challenges us to embrace deeper ontological shifts—toward interconnectedness, contemplation, and radical care—as essential dimensions for a just, ecological future. (Page 0)

Here, change is not a technocratic fix but a deep reckoning with the stories we tell, the relations we nurture, the ontologies we embody. (Page 0)

Socioecological Transformations confronts dominant framings of transformation that either remain apolitical and ahistorical, or overemphasizes the structural causes, while bypassing the ontological roots of the present-day socioecological violence and destruction. (Page 0)

the book exposes how materialist-dualist ontology and associated worldviews uphold hierarchies of worth, which in turn serve and uphold the colonial-racial-capitalist system of oppression. (Page 0)

The book calls for transformation where being, knowing, and doing are reimagined in relational, life-affirming terms. (Page 0)

Apart from ignoring the colonial-racial-capitalist origins of this socioecological destruction, the associated systemic violence and injustices generated and perpetuated by the colonial-racial-capitalist structures are also ignored, including poverty and social inequalities, climate colonialities, marginalization, and racialization (Page 1)

Incomplete assumptions about the root causes of socioecological destruction naturally lead to limited responses and viable solutions. (Page 1)

the overemphasis on structures/ structural violence often precludes any meaningful and deeper engagement with the ontological and epistemic assumptions that legitimize and discursively enable structural violence. (Page 2)

Note: Summary

Some scholars go so far to suggest that focusing on onto-epistemic issues, together with politics and the decoloniality of knowledge and worldmaking, is an unhelpful distraction from the “most urgent question of our time” (i.e., climate change and fossil capitalism) (Bluwstein 2021, see also Smith & Lester 2023). (Page 2)

the co-evolving nature of reality, which includes the entanglements between ideas and meaning on the one hand and outcomes/ reality on the other. (Page 2)

Overlooking the ideational and ontological roots of the structures and systems of oppression leads to a narrow solutions space, with social movements, mobilization, insurgency, and activism, as the main or even only tenants of transformations (De Rosa 2022; Sovacool & Dunlap 2022). (Page 2)

the underlying foundations of structural socioecological violence, including worldviews, mindsets, logics, values, patterns, and paradigms that justify, and enable the colonial-racial-capitalist system and its violence. (Page 2)

This book responds to the two above-outlined trends in transformations: (i) apolitical and ahistorical framing of transformations, which waters down the concept with intended or unintended benefit for the status quo, and (ii) the tendency to overemphasize the structural causes of socioecological violence and destruction. (Page 2)

aims to reclaim socioecological transformations as by definition radical, justice-centered theory-praxis, which acknowledges and addresses the deeper roots of the current socioecological violence, related to the materialist-dualist worldview, as the basis and enabling factor for the colonial-racial-capitalist systemic (Page 2)

broadens the meaning of transformations to include the ontological bases of structural causes of socioecological destruction. (Page 3)

unlearn and undo the dualist-materialist worldview that underpins the colonial-racial-capitalist structures of oppression and (ii) that do so through various means, including contemplation, self-study, the practice of deep interconnectedness, inner transformations, radical kindness, and openness (Page 3)

While the key purpose of capitalism is capital and profit accumulation at the sacrifice of human and more-than-human bodies, labor, territory, and dignity—such sacrifices, and by extension the accumulation of capital, and profit—could only be made possible through dehumanizing and racist ideologies. (Page 3)

To enable human exploitation in favor of the colonial project and capital accumulation, black and indigenous people had to be stripped of their humanity. (Page 4)

the ideational and ontological bases of the colonial-racial-capitalist regime are at the core of the socioecological violence and destruction and should also be at the core of socioecological transformations theories and praxis. (Page 5)

What currently drives the great divide between Minority and Majority Worlds (more commonly referred to as the Global North and Global South) is the Minority World’s interest in political and economic domination over the Majority Worlds (Page 5)

The hard task at hand is abolishing the predatory global financial, economic, and trade structures. (Page 5)

requires challenging, unlearning, and undoing the ontological bases that directly maintain the current racial, (neo) colonial, and class-informed neoliberal capitalist grip of some states, regions, and some communities over others. (Page 5)

ontological shift from me to “mwe” (Siegel 2022). (Page 6)

This larger materialist-dualist position separates mind from matter and suggests that matter is an “ontological primitive” (meaning irreducible objective entity that does not need to be described in terms of and/ or in relation to other “things” or “entities”). (Page 6)