Paper short abstract:

At a time when inter and trans disciplinary practice is constantly championed, this paper uses the example of an Indigenous-led project in Colombia called Munekan Masha to outline some of the obstacles and realities of transdisciplinarity in the current research environment.

Paper long abstract:

Addressing many of the world’s unprecedented contemporary challenges requires a multifaceted and integrated approach and, therefore, finding ways to integrate academic knowledge with grassroots wisdom is increasingly cited as important.

In concert, a drive towards non-extractive transdiscipinarity research (TDR) now emanates from global agencies, community groups and Indigenous people, whose calls for knowledge that includes non-academic voices from the outset, are getting louder. In the last decade, UNESCO, the International Science Council and Future Earth have recognised a paradigm shift is necessary if meaningful progress is to be made on TDR. As such, TDR challenges the way in which knowledge is currently produced.

Munekan Masha is a transdisciplinary project initiated and devised by an Indigenous group in rural Colombia called the Kogi. It brings academics to Colombia to learn, measure and record Indigenous land management techniques for the first time. As the Kogi apply different metrics to the landscape, this project has the potential to provide an alternative approach to recognising, creating, and defining what constitutes, healthy or flourishing territories.

In association with the experiences of setting up Munekan Masha, this paper explores the obstacles that the current education and research eco-system places on genuinely transdisciplinary work and considers how meaningful transdisciplinary methods might be created in the current system.

Paper short abstract:

Touch and the therapeutic relationship facilitate communication. Here I evaluate massage ethnography in a study of eight participants with life-limiting conditions and consider its potential as a method to address the epistemic injustices of conventional palliative care research methods.

Paper long abstract:

Palliative care research raises important ethical and practical considerations, but preventing people with life-limiting conditions from participating in research denies them the opportunity to inform practice with their knowledge. Massage ethnography is a novel means for suitably resourced social scientists to use massage sessions to gather verbal and non-verbal information in ways that do not impact on the dignity and resources of patients who have depleted energy and limited time. Touch and the therapeutic relationship facilitate communication through mechanisms that can adapt to diverse circumstances and environments. Here I describe and evaluate the use of massage ethnography in a study of eight participants with life-limiting conditions – primarily Parkinson’s Disease – and consider its potential as a method to address the epistemic injustices of conventional end-of-life research methods.

Paper short abstract:

Collaborative, interdisciplinary and multimodal research into industrial and hazardous waste mismanagement is one way of closing the gap when both environmental justice and injustice appear distant to those affected.

Paper long abstract:

Red mud, a bauxite residue from alumina production, is frequently linked to environmental and health concerns due to its high alkaline content and outdated storage infrastructure. In sites where it is mismanaged, questions of environmental justice typically revolve around how marginalised communities grapple with the enduring presence of industrial waste.

We conducted collaborative research as part of an interdisciplinary team of two anthropologists, one environmental scientist, and one investigative journalist in Almásfüzitő, northwest Hungary, which is home to several red mud reservoirs, the largest of which, at the time of research, was used to dilute hazardous waste. To close the distance between slow-moving scholarship and the urgency of environmental injustices, we produced journalistic articles (text, video), a comic book and a forthcoming audio documentary.

Analysing our findings, as well as our attempts to do anthropology differently through collaboration and multimodality, we conceptualise the environmental (in)justices faced in Almásfüzitő as both spatially and temporally ‘distant’. The divided settlement distances the residents of upper Almásfüzitő from the reservoir, which is located in the lower part of the settlement, but not the financial rewards for hosting it; the ‘slow violence’ of the dangerous waste seem distant from the everyday life of many locals; protests by external environmentalists are seemingly outside residents’ immediate concerns; EU regulatory actions are removed from corrupted Hungarian state-industry interactions; and the abstractions of scholarship and circumscribed independent media create a gap between research/reporting and citizens living with environmental injustices.

Paper short abstract:

In the context of processes of displacement, digital mapping provides a way of reasserting relationships to place. In contrast to crowd-sourced maps created by remote users, the approach we have taken with collaborators in Ethiopia builds on local people’s intimate knowledge of their environments.

Paper long abstract:

In Ethiopia, a group associated with the NGO Initiative for Pastoralist Communication (IPC) has collaborated with researchers from the UK on a project that combines participatory mapping and participatory software design. The process starts with local people deciding what they want to map and with whom they want to share the data; then the mapping app is co-designed with stakeholders and the mapping and information-sharing process begins. The interface is designed to be useable by people with low or no literacy, recognising that illiteracy does not necessarily imply deficits in (and may be inversely related to) knowledge of place. What is clearly threatening to relationships to place are a series of interventions by outsiders that risk undermining local livelihoods. In the past decade, communities in the Lower Omo Valley have been negatively affected by upstream dam construction – interrupting an annual flood that recharged grazing lands and provided opportunities for riverbank farming – and the expansion of commercial plantations. In the context of these processes of displacement, digital mapping provides a means of reasserting and reinscribing relationships to place. In contrast to conventional crowd-sourced maps created by remote users, our approach emphasises local people’s intimate knowledge of their environments. In this paper we consider the lessons we’ve learned from our collaboration and reflect on opportunities for equitable remuneration and data-sharing.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the social and environmental niches in which Amerindian children grow and how Amerindian relational epistemologies can inform alternative, outdoor and hands-on educational initiatives and help broaden their research base.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the social and environmental niches in which Amerindian children grow and how Amerindian relational epistemologies can inform alternative, outdoor and hands-on educational initiatives and help broaden their research base. The paper considers human learning and human development from the perspective of Amerindian sociality, with a special focus on the relationship between ontology, epistemology and states of mind and being. It traces learning environments, and the scenarios, tasks and attentions that constitute them, relating these to the development of attentional states and modes of perception that enhance biosocial diversity. The paper promotes holistic teaching and learning, that are transdisciplinary by default, and draws on two publications, “It takes a village: The learning environment, Amerindian relations and a poor pedagogy for today’s entangled challenges” (Chapter in Routledge’s, Anthropological Perspectives on Global Challenges) and “Formabiap’s Indigenous educative community: a biosocial pedagogy” (article in the Special Issue, Pedagogy and Indigenous knowledge and Learning, Oxford Review of Education).

Paper short abstract:

Academic air travel, a crucial topic for scholarship and action, poses particular dilemmas for anthropologists. This paper reports a journey to the UNFCCC COP28 using overland public transport and the insights gained from using green travel in order to attend a global mega-event such as this.

Paper long abstract:

Carbon emissions from academic air travel (AAT) are or should be of concern to all in higher education with an interest in saving the planet from environmental catastrophe. AAT is a particularly challenging issue for anthropologists, who are frequently compelled to undertake long-distance air travel for fieldwork and other research-related purposes (e.g. attending professional conferences). For an anthropologist researching global health and environmental diplomacy, there was a particular irony in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)’s 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) being hosted in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, a place so difficult to reach from most other parts of the world except by flying, the most carbon-intensive form of travel on the planet. I took the decision early on to travel to COP28 using overland public transport as much as possible. This paper will give an account of the journey and the diverse benefits of using travel modalities other than flying to reach COP28. In Clifford (1992)’s terms, separating ethnography (‘being there’) from travel (‘getting there’) seems particularly egregious if one seeks to undertake fieldwork at a global mega-event such as this without also considering the possibility of making the journey there an opportunity for action on AAT. In this paper I shall show how planning and executing such a journey yielded unexpected insights into climate change as a global problem and how we tackle it.