Contested Landscapes: The Political Ecology of Power and Identity In South and Southeast Asia

South and Southeast Asia are home to over two billion people. The region is deeply entangled with colonial histories, cultural ties, and social inequalities, thereby emerging as a major cultural hub in the international arena. As the region is located at the frontiers of overlapping ecological crises and rapid urbanisation activities, ranging from dam projects, railway projects, deforestation, and coastal erosion. Changes in the ecological landscape of the region are inseparable from the question of power, identity, inequality, and cultural meaning. In such a scenario, political ecology plays a major role as it provides a lens to see these entanglements, questioning power and inequality. This session embarks on the environmental alterations through the lived reality of power and survival, examining how states, corporations, and local communities negotiate access to land, water, and forests across the region. Drawing on sociological perspectives, panelists will analyse how neoliberal reforms, colonial legacies, and climate action policies reshape everyday livelihoods and drive new forms of resistance. The session also encourages papers on indigenous and agrarian communities that assert ecological knowledge and how their climate justice struggles have become relevant today, in the era of the Anthropocene. The session invites case studies and comparative work from scholars and practitioners in sociology, environmental studies, Asian studies, and anthropology, with emphasis on ethnographic insights and regional interconnectivity, especially works that intertwine environment and equality, where conservation displaces, and hope shows up in unexpected forms.