communities

A Tuesday Discussion with Lena Köhn.

We know where trees grow, but what about ideas? Writer and literary scholar Samantha Walton used to think of research centers as static offices and corridors, hubs for ideas to cluster and sprout. But at the Landhaus, an eco-farm in Bavaria, it is on walks with other fellows where their “thoughts strung out like threads across the paths” they traversed together.

This film is an audio-visual ethnographic project lived together with the peasant family Franco Gauto, in Colonia Luz Bella, rural Paraguay.

The authors examine how public participation is structured in the regime of rules over access to land, natural, and financial resources of a Wildlife Management Area (WMA) in Tanzania.

The authors explore the on-the-ground reality of Burunge Wildlife Management Area (WMA), stressing the misrepresentation of conservation policies in WMAs at the expense of local communities.

The authors provide an empirical study of the conservation strategy adopted in the northern Sierra Madre, the Philippines, and criticize the assumptions behind the main legalistic interventions.

Bas Verschuuren reviews the book World Heritage Sites and Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, edited by Stefan Disko and Helen Tugehndhat.

Alok Amatya studies the depiction of indigenous struggles against the grab of minerals, crude oil, and other natural resources by private and government corporations in works such as Arundhati Roy’s travel essay Walking with the Comrades (2010). He suggests that narratives of conflict over the extraction of natural resources can be studied as the corpus of “resource conflict literature,” thus generating a global comparative framework for the study of contemporary indigenous struggles.