Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

This paper develops a notion of socio-ecological justice based on theoretically informed empirical research on the local community struggles against run-of-river hydropower plants in Turkey’s Eastern Black Sea region. Drawing on the narratives of riverside communities which frame river waters not as “natural resource” but as the central element of their everyday lives. People relate to river waters in many intimate, corporeal, sensory, and affective ways. River waters not only shape the natural landscape and spatial organization of rural settlements; they are also a part of the social world, which is conventionally defined separately from “nature”. Maintaining the intrinsic relationship between social and ecological phenomena, it calls for rethinking ‘sociality’ and ‘social justice’ in the light of a relational ontology of human and non-human worlds. The paper conceptualizes the notion of socio-ecological justice in a dialogue with environmental and ecological justice literatures, expanding Nancy Fraser’s tripartite model of justice. Different from the environmental and ecological justice, it frames the relational existence of human and non-human life as a matter of justice.