Overview
Local participation is increasingly seen as a central and ethical part of environmental research. As such, many environmental efforts are becoming increasingly participatory. Participation, as a string of literature has shown, has many political, economic, social, and epistemic consequences, and ethics is fluid, polyvalent, and contextual. 'Right is right, wrong is wrong' is dangerous rhetoric that centres western experiences and forecloses the myriad realities and relations bundled within and forced upon marginalised experiences. Both participation and ethics – as concepts and praxis – cast decades-long shadows over field research (particularly in anthropology), yet much of these discussions are left at the threshold of interdisciplinary spaces, where participation, traditional and Indigenous knowledge, and co-production are brought in to sanitise and legitimise environmental actions. Where are our lessons learned and what ought we to make of their absence? The first half of this volume offers ethnographic examples that allow us to begin to ask whether participation (in the capitalist machinery and colonial legacies of academic knowledge) is ever even ethical. The second half of the book is dedicated to anti-solutions: refusals to define problems and approaches in fixed, closed terms from which equations, calculations, and solutions can be derived. This book provokes important new discussions about ethical participation in environmental field research by bringing to the fore the fluid nature of both ethics and participation. The volume aims to provide critical intervention for students and researchers across natural and social sciences whose fieldwork includes engagement with local communities and stakeholders, as well as conservation policymakers and practitioners who consult and work with local communities.
Full Product Details
Author: Lydia Gibson ,
Julia Sauma
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint: Routledge
Weight: 0.453kg
ISBN: 9781032343754
ISBN 10: 1032343753
Pages: 246
Publication Date: 28 July 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Availability: Not yet available
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.
Reviews
""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
""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
Author Information
Lydia Gibson is Assistant Professor at Georgetown University, USA. Julia Sauma is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.
