Pawpaws, temporal embeddedness, and unruly ecologies

In this paper, I trace a political ecology of pawpaws, a fruit indigenous to the Southeastern United States, to argue that identifying unruly, ecological situations- what I call unruly ecologies- helps scholars reorient their research to focus on moments of possibility for more sustainable and just futures. As critical scholars like Anna Tsing have demonstrated, dominant visions of ‘how the world works’ are neither sustainable or just. I argue that Tsing’s methodology allows for a better understanding of the eco-social relations that are found within our food systems. While I am concerned with global food systems broadly, in taking the pawpaw as my point of entry into one of many complex political ecologies of the modern world, I situate myself regionally in both the Rust Belt and Appalachian Regions and highlight everyday encounters as sites of possibility. In an effort to take up Tsings interweaving of everyday experiences with broader eco-social theorizing, I use my own encounters with pawpaws to think about eco-social processes more broadly. Finally, I consider the work of Andreas Malm and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, in relation to the seasonal temporality that, I argue, is an important point of focus for understanding the significance of the pawpaw’s unruliness in the modern world and the space that pawpaws make for thinking about our everyday orientations toward more eco-socially sustainable and just practices and interactions.