Ecologies

Representative:

Cyrus Samimi Cyrus.Samimi@uni-bayreuth.de

PI Members:

Eric Anchimbe, Lisa Hülsmann, Cyrus Samimi (University of Bayreuth), Eveline Sawadogo-Compaoré (Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo Ouagadougou)

Overview

While RS Ecologies is to be anchored in Ecology, our inter- and transdisciplinary work will expand beyond this disciplinary boundary to include more pluralistic research, towards the theoretical, methodological and practical reconfiguration of Environmental Studies in Africa. Thus, given their centrality to the histories, identities, livelihoods and futures of people on the African continent, this RS will address not only the contemporary Africa-specific dynamics of global environmental crises, but also their histories of embeddedness in colonial and postcolonial structures.

By now, the Anthropocene critique highlighting colonial modernity’s extractivism based on separation of the natural and social worlds (i.e. separation of nature and culture) is well known – but so is its underrepresentation of the realities, knowledges and experiences of Indigenous peoples (Akomolafe, n.d.; Densu, 2018; Mbembe, 2021). To date, studies in Ecology have been largely dominated by nature–culture dualism and fact–value dichotomies characteristic of imperial sciences, Global North development paradigms, and contemporary conservation and wilderness narratives. By and large, African ontologies, epistemologies and human-environment relations have been subjugated or ignored. There is an emerging body of research that is not only critiquing the above, but also seeking ways to address the limitations of predominantly natural-scientific approaches to ecologies in Africa, precisely through grounding African Environmental Studies in African ontologies and epistemologies  by which we mean the (grounded, plural) realities and ways of knowing of African peoples. In alignment with this research agenda, this RS proposes new, emic, relational, situated, creative and critically generative approaches to investigating African environmental–social relations and their complex cultural, political and social-ecological dynamics.

The aim of this RS is to address situated, spatial, eco-cultural and temporal heterogeneous aspects of world-making, from the continuous shaping over time of both urban and rural natural-cultural landscapes (Usher, 2023) to forms of eco-cultural relations expounded in eco-critical cultural texts (Adeniyi & Onanuga, 2023), for example. A diversity of methods will be applied, bringing together the biophysical and (human) social sciences and providing spaces for collaborative knowledge production to yield intersectional and transdisciplinary insights based in African lived realities. In order to address historical injustices and impacts, our lines of inquiry will foreground critical diversities, especially the contributions of women and youth in co-creating Africa’s futures.