Short Abstract

What counts as biodiversity loss and who does the counting? Foregrounding African cases and knowledges, this panel examines how species loss is registered, narrated and evidenced. We ask what African prisms reveal that dominant frameworks overlook.

Long Abstract

Global indicators, red lists and population models define knowledge about biodiversity loss and species extinction across the globe. For the African continent, the ecological data underpinning these models is particularly patchy. What counts as biodiversity loss and who does the counting matter. We seek to interrogate what becomes visible through these dominant frames, what assumptions they make about historical causes and processes, and what foregrounding “African prisms” would allow us to see differently. We invite contributions that explore how biodiversity loss and species extinction are registered, known and narrated at various sites on the African continent. We are interested in histories of scientific evidence but also in what we might learn by considering oft-ignored alternative archives of environmental knowledge (i.e. oral history, song, art, language, healing). Contributions may also focus on specific threatened or extinct species and trace their histories as objects of knowledge. By placing African cases and knowledges at the center of these questions, the panel explores how African prisms might unsettle established ways of seeing, assembling evidence and theorizing biodiversity loss and species extinctions.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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