Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 1 - GLO (Refiguring Conservation in/for \'the Anthropocene\': The Global Lives of the Orangutan)
Teaser
In recent years, conservationists have engaged in heated debates about whether and how conservation should respond to the challenges posed by ‘the Anthropocene’—a term increasingly used to encapsulate the overwhelming, transformative impact of human activity on the Earth...
Summary
In recent years, conservationists have engaged in heated debates about whether and how conservation should respond to the challenges posed by ‘the Anthropocene’—a term increasingly used to encapsulate the overwhelming, transformative impact of human activity on the Earth system. How are these debates—and the wider ‘Anthropocenic’ awareness they embody—reshaping conservation philosophy, strategy and practice? How are they manifested in and across diverse contexts? How, conversely, are global conservation developments and ‘Anthropocenic’ phenomena apprehended and reshaped on the ground? This project explores such urgent questions through an unprecedented study of the global nexus of orangutan conservation at a unique historical juncture marked by flux and uncertainty. Combining in-depth ethnography and multiply-scaled cross-cultural comparison, it approaches orangutan conservation as a sprawling, uneven terrain across which the rapidly-evolving relationship between conservation and ‘the Anthropocene’ is being played out. Its objectives are 1) to examine if and how contemporary conservation is being ‘scaled up’ and re(con)figured in and for ‘the Anthropocene’; and 2) to cut ‘the Anthropocene’ down to size by exploring how it is experienced, conceptualized, contested or indeed refused across multiple conservation settings. Comprising four interlinked studies to be carried out simultaneously at the main nodes of orangutan conservation, this project seeks to pioneer a new synchronic, multi-sited approach to the analysis of global conservation, and lay the groundwork for an empirically-driven, theoretically ambitious new field of scholarship on conservation in/for ‘the Anthropocene’—one that will revitalize social scientific understandings of conservation while adding much-needed empirical depth and nuance to emerging cross-disciplinary discussions about ‘the Anthropocene’.
Work performed
The project is still at a relatively early stage. Following an initial set-up period and a year of regular reading group discussions, research meetings, conference attendance and networking, the research team is now carrying out fieldwork on different aspects of orangutan conservation. We plan to regroup in mid-late 2020 to carry out the next phrase of the research: comparative analysis, writing-up, conference organisation and dissemination.
January to June 2018: Setting up the project and recruiting the project team. The administrator joined the project in February 2018, PDRA1 in April 2018, PDRA2 in May 2018, and PhD student in June 2018.
May 2018-present: Regular reading discussion groups, each revolving around a specific relevant topic or subfield, e.g. biodiversity conservation, the Anthropocene, extinction, care, conservationists’ biographies.
Autumn 2018: PDRA2 started interviews with orangutan adopters in the UK, US, Australia and elsewhere, and fieldwork with UK orangutan charities.
December 2018: Conservation and the social sciences: beyond co-optation and critique (King’s College, Cambridge). Groundbreaking cross-disciplinary/sectoral workshop between orangutan conservationists and social scientists, resulting in a joint article on current challenges facing orangutan conservation and new possibilities for the conservation-social science relationship (currently under review).
January 2019: PDRA1 started fieldwork in Central Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo.
June 2019: PDRA2 completed interviews with orangutan adopters.
Final results
As the project is at a relatively early stage, we have not yet made significant progress beyond the state of the art.
We hope that the jointly-authored publication from our December 2018 workshop will have a significant impact on the interface between conservation and the social sciences, and serve as a grounded example of a mutually transformative dialogue between the two fields. Our work on this relationship has generated more interest than anticipated, and we expect to develop new avenues for collaboration and exchange in the coming months.
We expect to have more significant results and updates in time for the mid-term project report.
Website & more info
More info: http://www.globallivesoftheorangutan.org.