The Ethics of Participation in Environmental Field Research Inclusion, Collaboration, and Transformation

PART I Anthropological perspectives on environmental fieldwork ethics

1 The disappearance of anthropology in participatory debates: The politics and poetics of deceleration, motion, knowledge, and labour

LYDIA GIBSON

2 How and what we observe: A brief introduction to theoretical perspectives in environmental social sciences

LYDIA GIBSON

3 Ethnographic instances: Ethnographic writing and the place of colonial knowledge

LYDIA GIBSON

4 When all our friends have gone away: On intention, abandonment, and attending to the assumptions of environmental fieldwork

JULIA F. SAUMA

5 We don’t trust you: On the interior lives of communities and collaborators in environmental research

LYDIA GIBSON

6 Data sharing in environmental science: Making unlikely violences visible

TONE WALFORD

7 Collaborations over wolf recovery: Conservation in Maremma, central Italy

AGNESE MARINO

8 Textual workshopping: The anti-product, unfixing, and rejection of ‘best-practice’ in participatory environmental research

LYDIA GIBSON

9 ‘Who owns these orangutans?’ And other feral questions: A conversation with Liana Chua

LIANA CHUA, LYDIA GIBSON, AND JULIA SAUMA

10 Interdisciplinarity, betrayal, and the ethics and purpose of (environmental) research: A conversation with Paige West

PAIGE WEST, LYDIA GIBSON, AND JULIA SAUMA

11 Working within: On attention, power, and play in environmental fieldwork – A conversation with Vanessa Agard-Jones

VANESSA AGARD-JONES, LYDIA GIBSON, AND JULIA SAUMA

12 Distance, conflict of interest, and sacrifice in environmental fieldwork: An interview with Sahil Nijhawan

SAHIL NIJHAWAN, LYDIA GIBSON, AND JULIA SAUMA

13 We have so much to work with: The potential and failure of partnerships in the living forest – A conversation with Manoel Profeta Melo dos Santos

MANOEL PROFETA DOS SANTOS, AND JULIA F. SAUMA

14 There is, in fact, a procedure: Creating legacies in collaborative field research – A conversation with Briggy

ORAL ‘BRIGGY’ WHITE AND LYDIA GIBSON

15 Concluding discussion: Ending with the anti-solution

LYDIA GIBSON AND JULIA F. SAUMA

Biography

Lydia Gibson is Assistant Professor at Georgetown University, USA.

Julia Sauma is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.

"This is the community-based research methodology book that we need! Gibson and Sauma have curated a volume that confronts the common assumptions, environmental research practices, and scholarly production shaped by unequal power relations and colonizing projects. Readers are invited into conversations between scholars that represent a level of praxis not often seen in academic circles. The authors compel us to question the ways in which we engage local communities in our research – our (un)ethics grounded in a moral superiority and the (mis)conception that science is neutral and objective. It is designed to spark reflection and critical discourse that has been overlooked for too long."

Kishi Animashaun Ducre, Associate Professor of African American Studies, College of Arts & Sciences, Syracuse University

"This volume makes the compelling case that making research inclusive and participatory is at best a starting point on the way to addressing the moral and political terrain we engage in doing environmental field research. Modeling and reflecting upon the possibilities of decelerating, staying with trouble, and remaining resolutely available to the formative force of being in relation with others, this collection powerfully returns fieldwork to us as a matter of concern. Gibson and Sauma eloquently attend to ethical ambivalence and political complexity in practicing the interdisciplinary, collaborative work of environmental and conservation studies. Their interlocutors in this endeavour offer moving, unfixed, generative, and situated reflections on complex cases and lifeworlds, opening new points of connection for significant ongoing conversations. The book will be a lifeline for scholars grappling with the complexities of generating and moving knowledge, data, and people within, among, and beyond scholarly realms." 

Alexis Shotwell, Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University

"Lydia Gibson and Julia Sauma, along with their collaborators in environmental (anthropological) research, have produced a creative, provocative, and relentlessly demanding co-produced volume that must become essential reading for the field and fieldworkers. Rarely are junior scholars allowed to fully articulate such strong critiques of the academic disciplines they labor within or to engage with an array of interlocutors in workshopping critiques that will resonate with readers at multiple stages of an environmental career.  The time is right for this fearless reclamation of ethics in the form of deceleration, embodiment, empathy, interiority, attention, strategic betrayal, and anti-solutionism, and for the revitalization of the qualitative social sciences in the face of morally and intellectually bankrupt disciplinary hierarchies. Readers who take on the challenge to read this volume in its entirety will be forced to reevaluate their own commitments and simultaneously reinvigorated in the ongoing struggle to liberate participation from its supremacist foundations."

Amelia Moore, Associate Professor of Marine Affairs, University of Rhode Island

"A refreshingly honest and deeply reflective conversation on the unexamined ethical challenges inherent in field-based participatory projects. The book invites both scholars and practitioners to slow down and grapple with the implications of our well-intentioned, oftentimes naïve, and potentially harmful approaches to participatory research. Engaging with theoretical gaps in the field of anthropology, reflecting on hard-won lessons from field research, and probing conversations with interdisciplinary scholars, the authors challenge us to hold space for deeper and more nuanced approaches to the ethics of collaboration, participation and the co-production of knowledge. Asking questions that refuse to go away, the authors provides important provocations for all scholar-practitioners about the ethics of knowledge co-production with Indigenous peoples and local communities."

Amity A. Doolittle, Senior Lecturer II and Research Scientist, Yale School of the Environment