Progress report Progress report in Political ecology II: Conjunctures, crises, and critical publics Farhana Sultana Syracuse University, USA Abstract Political ecologists focus on power relations across scales to develop assessments of systems that produce and maintain crises, such as the overlapping conjunctural crises of the coronavirus pandemic and climate breakdown. Such analyses clarify processual and interconnecting factors, exposing the contours of uneven differentiations and coproductions, while offering possible alternative futures. This report engages recent scholarship wherein conjunctural analysis raises issues for how we understand socionatural processes and outcomes, lessons learned, and the exigencies of critical publics in academia and beyond. Keywords capitalism, climate change, conjuncture, COVID-19 Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. (Arundhati Roy, Pandemic is a Portal, 2020) Introduction It is predicted that global pandemics will likely become more frequent with climate change and thereby portend a ‘new normal’ (Forster et al., 2020; Watts et al., 2021). Transformational changes to human–nature relationships and sys- tems will become necessary to alter this pro- jected trajectory. Such endeavors require taking stock of emergent explanations and anal- yses. Political ecology has a long history of investigating, explaining, and exposing various nature–society relationships. Since the corona- virus (COVID-19) pandemic of 2020–2021 is one of nature–society relationships at multiple spatiotemporal scales, political ecology scholar- ship can help critically explain ongoing trajec- tories and explore alternatives. Furthermore, given the existential, epistemological, and onto- logical crises wrought by the pandemic along with simultaneous climate change, for political ecologists – and indeed a progress report at this current conjuncture – to not pause to analyze the ramifications of the conjoint crises and lessons learnt ‘would deny our ability, and arguably abdicate our responsibility, if we did not use our skills in geographical scholarship to help bear witness and make sense of what is happening and to help cultivate new critical publics’ (Rose-Redwood et al., 2020: 100). Indeed, Corresponding author: Farhana Sultana, Syracuse University, 144 Eggers Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244-0001, USA. Email: sultanaf@syr.edu Progress in Human Geography 1–10 ª The Author(s) 2021 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/03091325211028665 journals.sagepub.com/home/phg