Tutor
Prof Richard Vokes
Start date
27th Feb 2025, 12:00- 13:00 UK Time
Type
8 x 1-hour classes
Price: £245
This course provides an overview of anthropology and environmental justice – using case studies drawn from all over the world – and introduces the conceptual frameworks, empirical knowledge, and practical skills, required to work in the field.
The course is aimed at those who have an interest in anthropology, and a commitment to environmental justice, yet who have not necessarily put the two things together. There are no prerequisites, although some understanding of ethnographic approaches, and/or environmental law, would be beneficial. The course forms part of the curriculum for the RAI’s Forensic and Expert Social Anthropology (FESA) qualification, but is designed to work equally well as a ‘standalone’ course.
Key words: anthropology, environmental justice, ethnography, Indigenous rights, environmental law, climate change, water rights, social movements, environmental policy.
Anthropologists have been supporting issues of environmental justice around the world for over a century. However, in recent years, in the inter-related contexts of late industrial development, bio-diversity loss, and the accelerating climate emergency, the field has expanded greatly – especially at the intersections with Indigenous rights, and with the anthropology of development in the Global South. Some of this new anthropological work has involved ethnography, which is to say, the observation and recording of environmental challenges and their effects. Yet so too, it has increasingly involved a range of other ‘applied’ work as well, including expert legal work. As with other kinds of Forensic and Expert Social Anthropology Practice (FESA), anthropologists are supporting litigation, in environmental law, and in environmental dimensions of: property and land law, constitutional law, and international law. They are also undertaking ever more work in environmental policy, advocacy, and activism.
Tutor biography
Richard Vokes is Professor of Anthropology and International Development at the University of Western Australia; Research Affiliate of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford, and; Research Associate of the Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip. He has been conducting anthropological fieldwork, including in environmental anthropology, all over the world, for over 25 years. His first ethnography, the award-winning Ghosts of Kanungu (2009), documented the profound, adverse social-ecological effects of the 1997-1998 El Niño event – the most powerful ever recorded – in the African Great Lakes region. He has also led a major environmental anthropology project in Antarctica, and is currently doing a growing amount of work in environmental justice with Indigenous Australians.
Summary of seminar topics
- Session 1: Anthropology and Environmental Justice
- Session 2: Ethnography in a Changing Environment
- Session 3: Environmental Laws
- Session 4: Anthropology and Environmental Policy
- Session 5: Environmental Social Movements
- Session 6: Anthropology and Water Rights
- Session 7: The Climate Emergency
- Session 8: Future Environments
Further information about classes
Session 1: Anthropology and Environmental Justice
This session traces the history of anthropology’s engagement with environmental justice, and explores how and why this engagement is currently expanding around the world. It looks at the potential benefits of an anthropological orientation towards environmental challenges, and introduces the terms and definitions which underpin anthropologists’ work in this field. The session looks at how anthropologists are contributing to Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) frameworks; are forwarding the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and; are supporting climate change policy and action, including through participation in the UN’s Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings.
Session 2: Ethnography in a Changing Environment
This session surveys the global ethnographic literature on environmental justice, to develop a comparative perspective on what are sometimes cast as the key ‘tensions’ in the field, between: individual vs collective rights; economic development vs environmental protections, and; human vs other-than-human rights. To trace how anthropologists are attempting to overcome these apparent tensions, this session focuses upon three especially vibrant bodies of recent ethnographic writing, on: 1) environmental disasters and their toxic effects; 2) infrastructure-led development and the living world, and; 3) renewable energy and Indigenous rights. The session also highlights the contributions that co-designed, and multi-modal, ethnographic approaches are making in each of these areas.
Session 3: Environmental Laws
This session explores the various legal areas in which anthropologists working in environmental justice are currently engaged. A key focus is upon FESA’s growing role within domestic environmental planning and protection frameworks; for example, the work it is contributing towards the more effective incorporation of social and cultural values into Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs). The session also looks at the kinds of litigation in which anthropologists are involved, and in so doing, follows Hanschel and Steyn’s (2021) distinction between those kinds of litigation that seek redress for ‘injustice due to environmental abuses’, vs. those which seek ‘justice for the environment’ itself. The session also looks at different kinds of litigation in domestic vs. international courts. Finally, it explores the ethics of, and risk management strategies for, FESA practice, across all of these domains.
Session 4: Anthropology and Environmental Policy
This session provides methods training for anthropologists hoping to contribute to environmental policy and advocacy. Drawing on the insights of the broader sub-field of the Anthropology of Policy, it demonstrates that policy interventions are not events, but complex social processes, which often require the mobilization of broad networks of groups and organisations. The session also shows how policy recommendations, even when these are robustly ‘evidence-based’, rarely produce direct outcomes. Instead, policy documents are more usefully thought of as ‘shaping the environment’, with the aim of creating the conditions in which changes in legislation might gradually occur. Finally, the session shows how policy advice is much more effective, in this regard, when the advocate has a clear strategy for dissemination. This should include a strategy for disseminating the same information through multiple media channels at the same time – what media scholars call ‘multichannel marketing’ – which has the effect of reinforcing the recommendations being made.
Session 5: Environmental Social Movements
This session focuses upon the anthropology of environmental campaigns. Using examples from all over the world, it highlights how an understanding of these campaigns frequently involves ethnography at ‘awkward scales’, given that these campaigns usually have local, national, and international dimensions – and are ever more highly mediated. The session will look at how environmental movements emerge, how they are organised, their typical modes of practice (including direct action), and how one measures their success, or failure. Its case studies focus especially on Indigenous environmental movements, and other campaigns which are markedly de-colonial in character. The session looks at how anthropologists can support these campaigns, and what ‘value-added’ they might bring, as well as tracing the ethics of, and risk management strategies for, such engagements.
Session 6: Anthropology and Water Rights
This session centres around a single extended case-study, on water rights. Because water is essential for human existence, management of its flows always and everywhere has economic, social, and political implications. So too, many cultures imbue water with additional symbolic meanings. It is therefore not surprising that water often becomes a highly contested resource, and a key focus for all kinds of environmental litigation, policy, and campaigns. Moreover, this ‘hydro-politics’, as well as the politico-legal processes which stem from it, are becoming everywhere more intense, as water sustainability becomes ever more precarious in the contexts of late-industrial development and the climate emergency.
Session 7: The Climate Emergency
This session examines anthropology’s contribution to environmental justice in the context of climate change, especially at its intersection with the anthropology of development. It is now well established that climate change is inextricably linked with wider socio-economic inequalities. The lowest income countries produce just 10% of global emissions, yet are the most vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change – in terms of e.g. food, health and water – and, by definition, the least well equipped to fund broad-based responses. In addition, climate change is also increasing the gap between rich and poor countries – indeed, by as much as 25% since 1960. Meanwhile, developed countries’ accelerating energy transition – towards renewable sources – is generating new challenges, but also new opportunities, for their Indigenous peoples. This session analyses what FESA is doing to address all of this: from producing rich, multi-species ethnographies of climate-vulnerable communities; to detailed analyses of the social, political, and cultural dimensions of the multi-lateral arenas in which global-scale mechanisms for redistribution are being forged (mechanisms such as ‘loss and damage’).
Session 8: Future Environments
The final session looks at what anthropologists are doing, in the present, to better safeguard future environments and livelihoods. Their contributions here are currently disparate, and vary across different parts of the world. Nevertheless, taken together, they give a clear sense of how an anthropology of the future could make a growing contribution to the overall field of environmental justice, in a heating world. This session will trace some of these strands, by looking at the critical contributions that anthropologists are already making to: 1) developing platforms for disaster preparedness; 2) supporting the strengthening of human security, and cultural resilience; 3) forwarding agendas for the energy transition, and ‘green futures’; 4) contributing to urban sustainability models, and; 5) helping to expand ecological protections frameworks (of all kinds). In short, this session traces the outline of a manifesto for a future anthropology that has environmental justice – in the broadest sense of the phrase – at its very core.
Please see our FAQ page or email courses@therai.org.uk with any questions. If you are a teacher and would like to organise a bespoke class with your students, please email us.
