The Ethics of Participation in Environmental Field Research

Inclusion, Collaboration and Transformation
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-34375-4
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 256 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 453 g

Reihe: Research and Teaching in Environmental Studies

This book provokes important new discussions about ethical participation in environmental field research by bringing to the fore the fluid nature of both ethics and participation.

Local participation is increasingly seen as a central and ethical part of environmental research; as such, many environmental efforts are becoming increasingly participatory. Participation, as a string of literature has shown, has many political, economic, social, and epistemic consequences, and ethics is fluid, polyvalent, and contextual. “Right is right, wrong is wrong” is dangerous rhetoric that centres western experiences and forecloses the myriad realities and relations bundled within and forced upon marginalised experiences. Both participation and ethics – as concepts and praxis – cast decades-long shadows over field research (particularly in anthropology), yet much of these discussions are left at the threshold of interdisciplinary spaces, where participation, traditional and Indigenous knowledge, co-production are brought in to sanitise and legitimise environmental actions. Where are our lessons learned and what ought we to make of their absence? The first half of this volume offers ethnographic examples that allow us to begin to ask whether participation (in the capitalist machinery and colonial legacies of academic knowledge) is ever even ethical. The second half of the book is dedicated to anti-solutions: refusals to define problems and approaches in fixed, closed terms from which equations, calculations, and solutions can be derived.

This book will be of great interest to all students and researchers across natural and social sciences whose fieldwork includes engagement with local communities and stakeholders, as well as conservation policymakers and practitioners who consult and work with local communities.

Zielgruppe

Academic, Postgraduate, Professional Reference, and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sauma, Julia

Gibson, Lydia

Fachgebiete

• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften
• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften, Biologie: Sachbuch, Naturführer
• Geowissenschaften Geographie | Raumplanung Geographie: Sachbuch, Reise
• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften Ökologie
• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Umweltschutz, Umwelterhaltung
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Empirische Sozialforschung, Statistik
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Forschung und Information Forschungsmethodik, Wissenschaftliche Ausstattung

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Part I. 1. The Disappearance of Anthropology in Participatory Debates: the politics and poetics of deceleration, motion, knowledge, and labour  2. How and What We Observe: a brief introduction to theoretical perspectives in environmental social sciences Part 2  3. Ethnographic Instances: ethnographic writing and the place of colonial knowledge  4. When all our friends have gone away: On intention, abandonment and attending to the assumptions of environmental fieldwork  5. We Don’t Trust You: on the interior lives of communities and collaborators in environmental research  6. Data Sharing in Environmental Science: making unlikely violences visible  7. Collaborations over wolf recovery and conservation in Maremma, central Italy  Part 3  8. Textual Workshopping; the anti-product, unfixing, and rejection of “best-practice” in participatory environmental research  9.Who Owns These Orangutans? And other troubling questions: an interview with Liana Chua  10. Interdisciplinarity, betrayal, and the ethics and purpose of (environmental) research: a conversation with Paige West  11. Working Within: On attention, power and play in environmental fieldwork – a conversation with Vanessa Agard-Jones  12. Distance, Conflict of Interest, and Sacrifice in environmental fieldwork: an interview with Sahil Nijhawan  13. We have so much to work with: the potential and failure of partnerships in the living forest – a conversation with Manoel Profeta Melo dos Santos  14. There is, in fact, a procedure: creating legacies in collaborative field research – a conversation with Oral “Briggy” White  15. Concluding Discussion: ending with the anti-solution

Über Autor(innen)

Lydia Gibson is Assistant Professor at Georgetown University, USA.

Julia Sauma is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.