Ecologies in Place

This is a key thematic cluster to foster interdisciplinary and transregional dialogue and collaboration across different Centres and Departments. Questions about sustainability, about human-environmental interactions, about the differential impacts of climate change, and about resource management are interrogated through a range of social and environmental phenomena, different spatial and temporal units of analysis, and a variety of methodological perspectives. This topic dovetails with labour in motion and futures of the university, in considering the impact of climate change on migration patterns, and on thinking about the ways that the Global South’s universities of the future can harness their expertise to address these pressing questions. 

The Centre of Latin American Studies is focussing on research on the interactions between water and society comprising three main strands: 1) Adaptations to Climate Change, 2) Rivers and Societies, and 3) Water and Urbanisation. In the Centre of African Studies, work spanning the historical archaeology of glass-bead making in Ife, to the impact of eighteenth-century desertification in the Sahara, through to contemporary environmental justice, energy, and sustainability in Uganda, has addressed questions of both long and short-term environmental impacts and the place of ecology in understandings of culture, rights, and the economy. 

At the Centre of South Asian Studies numerous senior scholars as well as postdoctoral researchers have focussed on the interactions of ideas between ports and peoples across the Indian Ocean. There has also been a long-standing interest in studying the relationship between ecology, food, and sustainability (the Green Revolution project with Madras University and University of Ceylon undertaken between 1975-77). In recent years, the GCRF funded research programme on Transforming India’s Green Revolution by Research and Empowerment of Sustainable Food Supplies (TIGR2ESS) have brought postdoctoral researchers and PhD students to the Centre to examine archival materials on food production and ecological sustainability in India and Sri Lanka. 

Opportunities to support work in this area: 

Endowing our engagement programmes will allow Ecologies in Place to expand its outreach and deepen collaborations. Funding for this research will enable COGS to foster collaborations within and beyond the university sector, as well as leading teaching at the cutting edge of questions of energy policy, cultures of sustainability, and the past and future of the environment.