SESSION 2 | CULTIVATING CRITICAL REFLEXIVITY FOR CONSERVATION

Session Organisers: Sam Staddon, Omar Saif, Fleur Nash, Timur Jack-Kadioglu

Session Abstract

Critical reflexivity is a process to help consciously engage with oppression in its multiple manifestations, and aims towards emancipatory goals of social and epistemic justice for marginalised peoples and world views. Conservation has long been a focus for political ecologists interested in exposing social injustices associated with protected areas, and in the knowledge politics of interventions to manage biodiversity. However, conservation as a movement has also matured, with reflective individuals and organisations critiquing perceived unjust and colonial policy. Both communities of practice are facing increased scrutiny based on their intersectional positions as they struggle in pursuit of transformative change and in their roles reproducing injustices in conservation. However, understanding the diverse cultures of reflexivity that exist across and through practice and research is still lacking. Questions of who has more responsibility to engage in critical reflexivity, what should be reflected upon, the forms through which it takes place, and the intended and unintended consequences thereof are but some of the issues our session seeks to explore.

PRESENTATIONS

Session abstract:

Illegal wildlife trade (IWT) has been mostly ignored in the Americas and the lack of government action has created a space for conservation organisations to lead the counter wildlife trafficking (CWT) agenda. Interest in South America means that previously uncommon conservation strategies are applied in the region, funded by international donors under discourses related to global security issues. Local priorities and narratives regarding the use of wildlife are now facing new CWT discourses, strategies and actors that have produced dire results elsewhere. The convergence between such strategies and local experiences, and its consequences, will elucidate the power donors and conservation organisations have in shaping relationships with nature and between stakeholders. This research analyses the use of discourses in the funding and implementation of conservation programmes against IWT in Peru, and how they interact with local knowledges and politics. Through an analysis of donor documents, donor and national policy and conservation organisations’ information, I describe the path CWT conservation action is taking in Peru, including the institutions involved, priorities, power relations and understandings of nature and the IWT. There is a need for critical reflexivity from both conservation practitioners and donors about the discursive and material constraints that structure and drive conservation practice, such as priorities and requirements set by donors and policy mobility. A critical reflexivity of the narratives and practices mobilised in CWT programmes will allow the exploration of the geopolitical background of such strategies and to better shape pathways for a decolonial conservation in the Americas.

Session abstract:

Reflexivity is a hallmark of good ethnography and many consider it a defining characteristic of anthropology. It is thus surprising that anthropologists have not paid more attention to how we teach students to be reflexive. Many of us learn reflexivity by making clumsy errors in the field, yet discussions of anthropological faux pas are typically limited to informal settings and occluded or heavily curated within our research outputs. In this article we employ analytic tools from cultural theory, in particular the notions of clumsiness, elegance, and uncomfortable learning, to contribute to developing a more explicit pedagogy of reflexivity. Since reading ethnographies plays a major role in how we teach anthropology, we argue that anthropologists should do more to foreground clumsy learning in their publications. To advance this agenda, we provide cases of clumsy learning drawn from our own field experiences, highlighting how the social, emotional and embodied awkwardness of each situation contributed to acquiring reflexive insights. This article is thus a call to initiate prospective researchers earlier into the messy backstage of clumsy anthropological research, including its embodied and affective aspects.

Session abstract:

As part of the PhD fieldwork, I, Sayan Banerjee, male, young, urban, higher educated, Hindu and hailing from upper class, upper caste and non-local background employed an immersive ethnographic fieldwork (still ongoing) with a rural, male-dominated, multi-ethnic, multi-class, multi-religious local community to understand people’s encounter patterns with wild elephants and their perspectives on ‘human-elephant conflict’ and elephant conservation in Assam, India. In this paper, I will chronicle the interaction between the local community and myself, how our positionalities interacted over the course of time and how it not only impacted my fieldwork and data, but also lives of both community members and myself. Due to my social background and the style of ‘parachute’-research, I was held as an expert on elephants and a conflict-solver which created a de-facto power imbalance between the community members and me, during daily conversations , group meetings, individual semi-structured interviews, casual walks and meet ups. Even though power structure helped me in getting ‘desired’ data swiftly, it created an unintended expectation on me to ‘help them out’. My clarification on ‘just doing the data collection for the sake of PhD’ and my certain steps to break the symbolic hierarchy often created dissonance among the community members. This again affected the way people dealt with me in their daily lives. Overall, the interactions provided certain affordances of access and inaccess into the lifeworlds of both the community and me, due to which both became nodes of ‘encounters’, fleeting, yet everlasting.