No dia 21 de Maio, Mara Jill Goldman (University of Colorado-Boulder) será a oradora convidada do seminário organizado pelos Grupos de Investigação Diversidades e SHIFT, com o tema Biodiversity conservation and transformational change: Exploring different ways of knowing, being with, and managing nature from Maasai communities in East Africa. A partir das 11:00h, na Sala 1 do ICS-ULisboa e online

Abstract:

Biodiversity conservation is at a critical impasse. The Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD) has crafted a new global framework calling for transformative change to ensure that by 2050, “the shared vision of living in harmony with nature is fulfilled” (CBD Secretariat 2021). Who will participate in creating this “shared vision” and what groups (and visions) will be left out? There is growing agreement within academic and policy circles on the important role that Indigenous Peoples around the world should play in this process. This agreement comes from 1) an awareness of the failure of traditional conservation mechanisms to halt biodiversity loss, 2) growing concern over the exclusion of Indigenous communities in conservation practice, and 3) increased recognition of high levels of biodiversity found on Indigenous lands. There is an urgent need to transform biodiversity conservation in ways that weave together various ways of knowing and being with nature.

In this talk, I present some aspects of my own approach to the work of weaving knowledge traditions for conservation through my book, Narrating Nature: Wildlife Conservation and Maasai Ways of Knowing (University of Arizona Press, 2020). The book draws on over two decades of fieldwork among Maasai pastoralists in northern Tanzania and southern Kenya. In the book, I seek to unsettle established ways of knowing, talking about, and managing human-wildlife relations and wildlife conservation in East Africa and center customary Maasai knowledge production and presentation processes—in the form of narratives and the use of an active Maasai meeting/dialogue, the enkiguena. I then ask what this model can do to guide us on the larger challenge of transforming biodiversity conservation globally.

Mara Jill Goldman is an Associate Professor of Geography, a fellow in the Institute of Behavioral science at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and currently affiliated with the Center for Applied Ecology, Instituto Superior de Agronomia (ISA), Universidade de Lisboa in Portugal. She earned her PhD in Geography (2006) and MS in Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development (2001) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and an MA in Geography from UCLA (1998).

She has worked with Maasai communities and organizations in Tanzania and Kenya for over two decades on the politics of knowledge surrounding wildlife conservation, climate change adaptation, and development—with a particular focus on the interface of Indigenous knowledge, gender, and science. She authored Narrating Nature: Wildlife Conservation and Maasai Ways of Knowing (2020) and co-edited Knowing Nature: Conversations at the Intersection of Political Ecology and Science Studies (2011). Currently, she is collaborating with international researchers and Indigenous activists on projects looking at what it means to decolonize conservation and support Indigenous conservation models in different places around the world, from East Africa to South and Southeast Asia, Canada and the US.