Conservation & Human-Animal Distancing

In this week’s episode, host Dr Jennifer Cearns is joined by Dr Megnaa Mehtta, Dr Adam Runacres, Jia Hui Lee and Nicolas Rasiulis (McGill University) to discuss their research looking at the relationships between humans and animals in various contexts around the world. 

What’s the right distance to have between humans and other animal species? Who gets to decide? And how do these decisions impact those whose livelihoods depend upon proximity to animals, whether as hunter-gatherers or safari tourist guides? Finally, how can these questions inform conservation practices at a time when humans are rapidly encroaching upon the habitats of other species across the planet?

• Dr Megnaa Mehtta is an environmental anthropologist with an interest in the political economy of values, emotions and ideas of well-being and how they relate to debates in global conservation and political ecology. She has conducted longterm ethnographic fieldwork in the Sundarbans forests of India. Alongside her academic writing, Megnaa mediates between a wide range of environmental stakeholders, including Delhi and Kolkata-based lawyers, activists, filmmakers and conservationists with the hope to contribute to conversations and initiatives at the intersection of law, civil society and anthropology that work toward more convivial forms of conservation. She tweets @MMehtta.
• Dr Adam Runacres is a social anthropologist based at University College London, and is currently working as UCL AnthroSchools Programme Officer to introduce school students to anthropology as a discipline. His research explores the relationships between forest officials and local people around Panna Tiger Reserve in Central India, drawing on a range of disciplines to provide insight on issues such as forest employment, village displacement, livelihoods and conservation authority. He tweets @AdamRunacres.
• Jia Hui Lee is a PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on how people in Morogoro, a town in the East African nation of Tanzania, navigate different types of human-rodent encounters. When we think of rats and mice, we often think of them as pest and disease carriers. Jia Hui’s research shows how --  through different social and intellectual processes --  rodents become more than just pests: they are research subjects, sensing technology, and a source of food. He tweets @zooanthrosmia.
• Nicolas Rasiulis is a Canadian-Lithuanian anthropologist who is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. His work attends to Mongolian Dukha hunter-gatherer reindeer pastoralists’ adjustments to nature conservation regulations within the Tengis-Shishged National Park, and vice versa, as well as to avenues toward collaborative conflict resolution.

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