Geographies of Injustice: Placing Caribbean Landscapes in the Global Order with Dr. Amanda Byer
When and Where
Speakers
Description
The School of the Environment and the Centre for Caribbean Studies invite you to join us for 'Geographies of Injustice: Placing Caribbean Landscapes in the Global Order' with Dr. Amanda Byer, a Senior Researcher at the Sutherland School of Law, University College in Dublin, Ireland.
The talk will take place on Wednesday, June 4th, 2025, from 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM in ES 1042 (5 Bancroft Avenue, Toronto, ON M5S 3J1) and virtually on Zoom (meeting details sent to participants the week of event).
Registration is required.
Registration will close at 10:30 AM on Monday, June 2nd, 2025.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Amanda Byer is an interdisciplinary legal scholar focusing on the intersections of landscape, property, and environment in the Caribbean context. She holds a PhD from Leiden University, the Netherlands. She was a Hauser Global Postdoctoral Fellow in environmental law at New York University, and she is currently Senior Researcher in the Property [In]Justice Project at the Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin, where she lectures in climate and environmental law. Her doctoral thesis ‘Heritage, Landscape and Spatial Justice: New Legal Perspectives on Heritage Protection in the Lesser Antilles’, published as a monograph (Sidetone Press, 2020), conducted the first legal geographical analysis of heritage, environmental, and planning laws in the Caribbean, and emphasised the significance of recovering the legal dimensions of landscape to achieve spatial justice in the region.
Seminar Abstract
Climate change and ecological collapse are not just part of the Caribbean future but rooted in the Caribbean past. Caribbean islands were the sites of experimentation for European empires because of their relative remoteness and pristine environments. These events are entangled with the ascension of the global capitalist order: the institutional scaffolding of trade and speculative investment was developed through plantation agriculture. Maximising plantation agriculture led to the creation of some of the first nature reserves and birthed the botany and ecology fields, and from other scientific explorations in this region emerged concepts such as biodiversity and forestry management that underpin international environmental law today. In spite of their outsized contributions to the global order, Caribbean environments as peopled places or landscapes were forever transformed by the extractive processes laid down during Empire, and the idea of nature as wilderness or empty space has prevailed in the law ever since, excluding communities that are closest to nature. The focus of this talk is on Caribbean landscapes, as a means of addressing unique island realities and vulnerabilities that are absent from the dialogue on sustainable futures. Landscapes represent the lived-in experiences of local communities and their interactions with nature that are relevant for collective identity, sustainable livelihoods and way of life. They counteract the perspective of the environment as a monolithic concept. Yet they find no formal recognition in the law, which continues to treat the environment as generic property bought and sold on the market. This talk advocates for adding landscape and place protection (spatial justice) to the discourse on decolonial, emancipatory approaches to Caribbean development by highlighting the emplaced dimensions of Caribbean identities and lifeways.