OEP Public lecture, Wed. 29 July, 6.15pm, University of Melbourne, Old Arts public lecture theatre
“Social-environmental engagements: From Kerang salinization and agro-forestry participation to the place of trans-local perspectives.”
Prof Peter Taylor, Critical and Creative Thinking (CCT) Graduate Program, University of Massachussetts, Boston, USA
In my 2005 book, Unruly Complexity, I problematize boundaries used by researchers to partition off complex situations into well-bounded systems and backgrounded or hidden processes. Of course, problematizing boundaries would not be necessary unless it were not also the case that environmental scientists can readily adopt explicit or implicit boundaries and study what is inside them. The challenge then is to develop a frame that acknowledges people’s efforts to make boundaries work for them as well as the ever-present potential for their accounts to be confounded by what is left outside. In this talk I present a series of vignettes or snapshots that speak to this challenge, moving from research on salinization in Kerang and pastoralism in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1970s, to studies of soil erosion in Mexico and participatory agro-forestry in Kenya in the 1980s, to participatory social planning in Ontario in the 1990s. These vignettes are chosen to highlight the tension between the local and the translocal, that is, to take seriously the participation of diverse people whose livelihood is directly dependent on the ecosystem, and, at the same time, acknowledge researchers’ professional identities and abilities as people who can contribute analyses of changes that arise beyond the local region or at a larger scale than the local.
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