Marnie Graham defended her thesis on Postcolonial Nature Conservation

Yesterday Marnie Graham successfully defended her thesis at Stockholm University on "Postcolonial Nature Conservation and Collaboration". Her study is part of our Ways Of Knowing Urban Ecologies project in Cape Town where she has studied nature conservation and collaborative arrangements at the Macassar Dunes.

By framing the site and nature conservation practices as embedded in colonial and apartheid legacies she uncovers how such legacies both continue and are negotiated when people from different backgrounds meet, including how nature conservators can elaborate new identities and methods.

Based on empirical work in Cape Town, her thesis develops a more general approach on how to handle and understand the intersection between conservation and urbanization, in particular in cities of the Global South.

For a copy of the thesis, please email Stockholm Resilience Centre or Marnie Graham or me.

I have had the great pleasure to be Marnie's advisor on this project, together with human geographer Sandie Suchet-Pearson at Macquarie University in Sydney.