Through research on famine, foraging, rice cultivation, and cash-crop economies alongside a collaborative food-sharing activity, this essay examines tensions between biodiversity conservation, subsistence practices, and Malagasy post-colonial struggles for food sovereignty.
Oyster restoration in the Chesapeake Bay increasingly draws on Indigenous ecological histories and shell midden archaeology. But who has the right to access, interpret, and mobilize these knowledges?
Across North America, co-management is often presented as a progressive model for conservation. But when decision-making authority remains unequal, is shared management meaningful change or the continuation of older colonial structures?
Exploring Maunakea as a site of conflict over astronomy, conservation, Indigenous sovereignty, and translation, this project asks what happens when relationships to land must be made legible to outside institutions in order to be recognized.
Animal testing often evokes strong images and intense debate that draw binaries of pro or against. Through the concepts of Donna Haraway and case studies, we discuss the nuances and opportunities to balance research outcomes with more thoughtful relationships between people and lab animals.
Drawing on Marisol de la Cadena’s concept of the “anthropo-not-seen,” we discuss whether granting legal rights to nature can create visibility for Indigenous ontologies, or if it risks reinforcing the very systems that have historically erased them.
How does anthropocentrism shape scientific relationships with plants and animals?
How and why people choose which species to value in conservation?
In landscapes marked by genocide, state terror, and ecological transformation, ghosts do not simply represent what was lost but return to disrupt settled temporalities, animating struggles over justice, memory, and the ethics of killing. Tracing a personal and ethnographic encounter in Tierra del Fuego, this essay explores how rage, refusal, and haunting unsettle conservation logics... Continue Reading →
ConsEthicsSyll Fall 2025Download