Seeing animals like a state? Divergent forester subjectivities and the managing of human-wildlife conflicts in South India Abstract: How do foresters in India understand the foundational and proximate causes of negative interactions between humans and wildlife? In this article we identify five distinct epistemological orientations towards managing human-wildlife conflicts (HWC) and drivers of those conflicts among staff at differing levels of the Indian forest bureaucracy across three protected areas in the Western Ghats. Through an empirical analysis employing Q method, we analyze forester subjectivities in relation to how forests should be managed with HWC mitigation in mind. Our results suggest forester perspectives are informed by social class and rank, geography, and experience. Forester positionality and knowledge is also at times in conflict with hegemonic perspectives of forest departments and can lead to the development of tensions in how foresters think about human-wildlife relations and managing HWC. Our analysis brings together concepts of multiple environmentalities with Gramscian ideas of the incoherent individual to theorize the varying subjectivities of individual state actors in understanding, managing, and co-producing forms of HWC. In doing so, this article contributes to contemporary debates about the theorizing of subject-making in political ecology and geography through an empirical case from one of the most important megafaunal conservation landscapes in Asia. Citation: Choudhury, U. R., Margulies, J. D., Mariyam, D., Rajeev, B. R., & Karanth, K. K. (2023). Seeing animals like a state? Divergent forester subjectivities and the managing of human-wildlife conflicts in South India. Geoforum, 147, 103892.
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April was an exciting month for CCGC members. Here is a list of some good things that happened:
Noah Jacobs was awarded a prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP) in 2024. He will be using his NSF stipend to attend the University of Oregon, where he is pursuing a PhD in Geography working with Dr. Sarah Cooley. Noah’s project will be using critical remote sensing and ethnographic field work to understand how changing Arctic hydrology will affect the livelihoods of Alaskan peoples. Benjamin Trost received a competitive Udall Undergraduate Scholarship worth $7,000 from the Udall Foundation. Go Ben! “The Scholarship Program identifies future leaders in environmental, Tribal public policy, and health care fields. It is highly competitive, with students participating in their schools’ internal competitions before receiving consideration from the Udall Foundation. As a condition of their award, Scholars attend a multiday Scholar Orientation experience. The Udall Undergraduate Scholarship honors the legacies of Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall, whose careers had a significant impact on Native American self-governance, health care, and the stewardship of public lands and natural resources.” You can learn more about the Udall here: https://www.udall.gov/ourprograms/scholarship/scholarship.aspx Jared Margulies' book, The Cactus Hunters, received honorable mentions for the following book awards: The AAG Globe Book Award for Understanding in Public Geography, the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the AAGs Outstanding Book Award, and the Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award from the Political Geography Specialty Group of the AAG. Interested in pursuing a PhD in the Geography and Environment Program at the University of Alabama? Dr. Jared Margulies is recruiting a new PhD student to start in Fall 2024 on a TAship (+health insurance, stipend). Potential opportunity to assisting with grant writing development that could lead to an RAship, but with 4 years of guaranteed funding on TA. Contact Jared at jdmargulies at ua dot edu with a CV and short expression of interest, clearly expressing why you would want to join our research collective to get the conversation started. Applications for full consideration will need to be submitted to the graduate school by December 15th for full consideration for all additional fellowship/scholarship opportunities.
A new article was published by Jared Margulies and Francesca Moorman of University College London in the online magazine Current Conservation. The article is based on the paper "Prevalence and perspectives of illegal trade in cacti and succulent plants in the collector community" published in Conservation Biology earlier this year.
Original article abstract: Although illegal wildlife trade (IWT) represents a serious threat to biodiversity, research into the prevalence of illegal plant collection and trade remains scarce. Because cacti and succulents are heavily threatened by overcollection for often illegal, international ornamental trade, we surveyed 441 members of the cacti and succulent hobbyist collector community with a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach. We sought to understand collector perspectives on the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) and on the threats IWT poses to cactus and succulent conservation. Most respondents (74% of 401 respondents) stated that illegal collection in cacti and succulents represents a “very serious problem” and that the problem of wild plant collection is increasing (72% of 319 respondents). Most forms of illegal collection and trade were seen as very unacceptable by respondents. Self-reported noncompliance with CITES rules was uncommon (11.2% of 418 respondents); it remains a persistent problem in parts of the cacti and succulent hobbyist community. People engaging in rule breaking, such as transporting plants without required CITES documents, generally did so knowingly. Although 60.6% of 381 respondents regarded CITES as a very important tool for conservation, sentiment toward CITES and its efficacy in helping species conservation was mixed. Collectors in our survey saw themselves as potentially playing important roles in cactus and succulent conservation, but this potential resource remains largely untapped. Our results suggest the need for enhanced consultation with stakeholders in CITES decision-making. For challenging subjects like IWT, developing evidence-based responses demands deep interdisciplinary engagement, including assessing the conservation impact of species listings on CITES appendices. Read the open access full article here: https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cobi.14030 Margulies, J. D., Moorman, F. R., Goettsch, B., Axmacher, J. C., & Hinsley, A. (2022). Prevalence and perspectives of illegal trade in cacti and succulent plants in the collector community. Conservation Biology, e14030. Utkarsh Choudhury defended his written comprehensive exams at the end of May 2023, prior to beginning his second summer of preliminary fieldwork in India on the concept of "river rejuvenation" and river conservation of the Ganga. Utkarsh plans to defend his dissertation proposal in August 2023.
From University of Minnesota Press: Cacti and succulents are phenomenally popular worldwide among plant enthusiasts, despite being among the world’s most threatened species. The fervor driving the illegal trade in succulents might also be driving some species to extinction. Delving into the strange world of succulent collecting, The Cactus Hunters takes us to the heart of this conundrum: the mystery of how and why ardent lovers of these plants engage in their illicit trade. This is a world of alluring desires, where collectors and conservationists alike are animated by passions that at times exceed the limits of law. What inspires the desire for a plant? What kind of satisfaction does it promise? The answer, Jared D. Margulies suspects, might be traced through the roots and workings of the illegal succulent trade—an exploration that traverses the fields of botany and criminology, political ecology and human geography, and psychoanalysis. His globe-spanning inquiry leads Margulies from a spectacular series of succulent heists on a small island off the coast of Mexico to California law enforcement agents infiltrating a smuggling ring in South Korea, from scientists racing to discover new and rare species before poachers find them to a notorious Czech “cacto-explorer” who helped turn a landlocked European country into the epicenter of the illegal succulent trade. A heady blend of international intrigue, social theory, botanical lore, and ecological study, The Cactus Hunters offers complex insight into species extinction, conservation, and more-than-human care. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions. $24.95 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-1399-1 $100.00 cloth ISBN 978-1-5179-1398-4 392 pages, 50 b&w photos, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, November 2023 You can pre-order The Cactus Hunters here: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-cactus-hunters. As part of their research collaborations through the Collaborative Arts Research Initiative (CARI) at the University of Alabama, CARI fellows Jared Margulies and Misha Hadar (UA Theatre and Dance) published a peer-reviewed journal article in the curations section of the journal Geohumanities about their installation of the Undocumented Migration Project's Hostile Terrain '94 exhibition in Fall 2021.
Article Abstract. In the fall semester of 2021, we organized and curated the participatory art project Hostile Terrain ‘94 at the University of Alabama. The project, conceived and developed by the Undocumented Migration Project, consists of ∼3,200 toe-tags carrying information of deceased migrants found on the US side of the US-Mexico border in the Sonoran Desert. They produce a map of tremendous death. The project allowed participating institutions to make their own decisions regarding how to coordinate the creation of the material and staging and curation of the final exhibition. Apart from its importance as a way of engaging a public with the often-unseen consequences of US border policy and policing, it is also an experiment in collaborative art making. What kind of experience did we want to structure for those taking part in creating the materials? How were we going to stage the encounter with the finished materials? We discuss organizing the creation of materials, setting up the installation, and the period when the project was open to the public to highlight two elements that were of special importance in the process: the subject position engaged by the project, and the meditative practice proposed by the installation. Hadar, M., & Margulies, J. D. (2023). Hostile Terrain 94, Installation, and Meditative Explorations of the US-Mexico Borderlands. GeoHumanities, 1-18. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2373566X.2022.2160367 Abstract: The special issue Illicit geographies and contested environments centers the intersection between environmental change and illicit geographies. It brings together five research articles that together underpin and substantiate what we are calling political ecologies of the illicit. In the introduction to the special issue, we review how scholars situated at the intersections of political geography and political ecology contribute to the study of illicit economies and how responses to them produce and/or reify long-standing practices of exclusionary environmental protection and securitization bolstering military, state, and capitalist economic power and control. The articles cover a wide range of empirical contexts from illicit crop cultivation and drug economies to illegal timber and commodity trades to the role of policing in (re)shaping illicit environmental activities. Across these studies is a clear central theme: how the state and its practices are central to defining, (co)producing, shaping, and benefitting from illicit activities with environmental consequences. The articles demonstrate that illicit practices are often not so different from state-like practices; both are concerned with maintaining privileged access to, and power over, the management and circulation of resources and the spaces they derive from. The introduction provides an overview to these themes, focused on how the illicit reconfigures human-environment relations and produces new sorts of environmental actors through ever-expanding frontiers of accumulation.
The full special issue, including an afterward on "Prohibition Geographies" by Dr. Kendra McSweeney, is available from Political Geography here: https://www-sciencedirect-com.libdata.lib.ua.edu/journal/political-geography/special-issue/10909JXG40P. The introduction to the special issue by Jared Margulies, Francis Massé, and Brittany VandeBerg, is available here: https://www-sciencedirect-com.libdata.lib.ua.edu/science/article/pii/S0962629822002323 |
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