🗓️ 24 September 2025
⏰ 14:30 – 16:00 (incl. Q&A)
đź“Ť Lumen 1, Lumen Building, Wageningen Campus (in person only)
Both research and popular discourse tend to frame Pacific Island nations as remote and abstract, as sinking places of climate catastrophe without a future. At the same time, the ways in which specific dimensions of colonialism and capitalism underpin environmental vulnerability remain neglected, as well as how Pacific Islanders navigate this polycrisis moving forward. In this talk, Heide centers the everyday experiences of women in the Solomon Islands harvesting food in mangrove forests. By delving into the emotional, affective and embodied dimensions of both burden and desire, she argues that imagining island futures begins from the haptic experiences of digging in the muddy mangroves. Importantly, Heide situates this scholarship as an under-developed epistemic dimension of environmental justice.
About the presenter: Heide K. Bruckner is political ecologist and human geographer interested in the uneven impacts of food system change. She has conducted qualitative research on the emotional, embodied and everyday aspects of intersectional food (in)justice related to race, class, gender and indigeneity in the United States, Latin America and Oceania. She currently works as a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Geography and Regional Science at the University of Graz, Austria.
Centre for Space, Place and Society 