Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Cross-Appointments
Fields of Study
- Culture & History
- Economic Geography
- Environment & Climate
- Rural
- Social & Political Geography
Areas of Interest
Political ecology, political economy of environmental change, extraction and extractive geographies, commodification of nature, critical perspectives on socio-environmental metrics, the wine sector and agrarian change in Languedoc (France).
Biography
My research interests lie at the intersection of a critical, pluralist political economy on the one hand, and the dynamics of environmental change on the other. I am particularly interested in capitalist metabolisms, that is, how the distinct political and economic character of capitalism shapes and is shaped by environmental change and the politics of environmental justice. I think of this interest in succinct terms as a political ecology of capitalism.
These general interests take more specific forms and my work tends to have an empirical dimension to it. I am particularly interested in the ways in which discrete (or ostensibly discrete) elements of biophysical nature (including human and non-human life) are produced, circulated, exchanged, and come to be understood or take on meaning as commodities, along with how these activities are regulated. How is it that nature is commodified and with what attendant political and ecological consequences? In what ways are such tendencies ever truly complete (i.e., is commodification an outcome or a process?) and how and why is commodification advanced? Can commodification processes be reversed and, if so, how? What are the limits and contradictions of the commodification of nature? How do these questions and the processes to which they refer intersect with the politics and experiences of everyday life? Necessarily, these interests find both theoretical and empirical expression for me. Most recently, I have been working on a collaborative project exploring a longstanding and ongoing shift from industrial wine production to quality wine production in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of France, with emphasis on the intersecting regulatory, agronomic and ecological dimensions of this transition.
Publications
Doncieux, A., O. Yobrégat, S. Prudham, S.Caillon, and D. Renard (2022). Agrobiodiversity dynamics in a French wine-growing region. OENO One 56(4): 183–199
Prudham, S. (2022). Food relief deliveries and urban topologies of pandemic risk in Toronto. Dialectical Anthropology 46: 327–345.
Prudham, S., & MacDonald, K. I. (2020). Qualifying tradition: Instituted practices in the making of the organic wine market in Languedoc‐Roussillon, France. Journal of Agrarian Change, 20(4), 659–681.
Ekers, M., & Prudham, S. (2017). The Metabolism of Socioecological Fixes: Capital Switching, Spatial Fixes, and the Production of Nature. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1-19.
Prudham, S. (2009). Pimping climate change: Richard Branson, global warming, and the performance of green capitalism. Environment and Planning A, 41(7), 1594-1613.
Most of my publications are available through my personal website at http://scottprudham.org/published-work/