Discussion on Indigenous Knowledge and Community Environmental Justice

Thursday 15 April, 9.00 - 10.15

How can ethnographic and world cultures museums use their collections and galleries as spaces which create active discussion around the impact of humans on the planet, while also highlighting what long-term perspectives can tell us about sustainability for developing positive futures? The project TAKING CARE explores the connections between ethnographic collections and questions regarding the climate crisis, the Anthropocene and issues related to the afterlives of colonialism. 

In the second week of the 'Matters of Care: Museum Futures in Times of Planetary Precarity' Conference series, we will hear from two speakers about environmental justice, community conservation and the preservation of environmental knowledge from different global perspectives. Through their experiences, they showcase the diverse ways of documenting and capturing environmental knowledge, discussing the ways that these processes of learning and gathering are ethical and sustainable.

Register for this event here.

'Reflections from Environmental Anthropology'

Speakers:

Dr Pauline von Hellermann is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. She is an environmental anthropologist with research interests in mining, youth and patronage politics, science policy processes, infrastructure, multi-sited ethnography, political ecology and environmental justice. She currently holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2018-2021) for the project Red Gold: A Global Environmental Anthropology of Palm Oil.

'Becoming (in)visible in environmental justice struggles: using participatory mapping, filming and writing to support the indigenous research agenda'

Iokiñe Rodríguez Fernandez is a Senior Lecturer in Environment and International Development at the University of East Anglia, UK. Her work on environmental conflict transformation focuses on issues of local history, local knowledge, power, environmental justice, equity and intercultural dialogue. This has led to her building local and institutional capacity to transform environmental conflicts in Venezuela, Guyana, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia and Colombia.

Discussant:

Dr Ashley Coutu is an archaeologist and Research Fellow at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Her research on the ivory trade draws on historical ecology as an approach for understanding the relationship between humans and elephants in the past and present.