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Cultural Hybridity and the Environment

Strategies to celebrate local and Indigenous knowledge

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  • © 2015

Overview

  • Addresses the debates surrounding the role of scientific, local and indigenous knowledge and participation in sustainable development initiatives

  • Sheds light on the local spaces of power and knowledge of environmental management and community development projects

  • Illustrates the potential of strategies for cultural hybridity that are advocated as necessary for increased knowledge sharing and synergy for more sustainable environmental governance outcomes

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Table of contents (11 chapters)

  1. The Foundations for a New Conceptual Framework for Cultural Hybridity

  2. Edge Politics in Action

  3. Local Voices in the Landscape

  4. Knowledge Networks Across the Landscape

  5. Strategies for Cultural Hybridity

Keywords

About this book

This book highlights the importance of diversity in overcoming issues of social and environmental degradation. It presents conceptual and practical strategies to celebrate local and Indigenous knowledge for improved community development and environmental management.

David Harvey has proclaimed, “The geography we make must be a peoples’ geography.” This clarion call challenges geographers around the world to consider the power and potential of geographic knowledge as the basis for social action – a call this book answers, providing readers the theoretical and conceptual tools needed to understand the social world and empowering them to mobilize social change.

The author uses empirical case studies of two environmental management and community development projects to document how knowledge generation is “essentially locally situated and socially derived.” In doing so she charts a path for moving beyond what Vandana Shiva so aptly describes as “monocultures of the mind.” The book argues that local and Indigenous knowledge must not be seen in opposition to scientific knowledge, as none of these knowledge traditions hold all the answers to localized socio-environmental problems. Rather, as the author explores through a set of processes and strategies to enable, support and celebrate ‘cultural hybridity’ at the local environmental governance scale, these respective knowledge systems can learn to speak to each other. Such dialogue has the potential to support more sustainable outcomes at multiple environmental governance locales.

This book will be of interest to everyone involved in environmental policy, planning or politics, and for those who want to make this planet a more sustainable and just place.

Authors and Affiliations

  • CSIRO (Adaptive Social and Economic Systems Program), Dutton Park, Australia

    Kirsten Maclean

About the author

Kirsten Maclean is a human geographer who specialises in the use of participatory methodologies to investigate the role of diverse people, knowledge and values in regional natural and cultural resource governance and management. She engages in cross-cultural collaborative research with Indigenous and non-indigenous peoples, and uses qualitative participatory research methodologies (including visual methods) to guide her co-research projects. She enjoys working in diverse teams including scientists, representatives from government and non-government agencies, Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, and multi-media experts. Much of her work has been conducted in remote and rural settings in Australia (the Wet Tropics, the Torres Strait, central Australia, Victoria, New South Wales) and Central America (Honduras and Costa Rica). She is sensitive to cultural protocol and has developed substantial research agreements with Aboriginal co-researchers. Kirsten Maclean currently works as a Research Scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Brisbane Australia.

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Cultural Hybridity and the Environment

  • Book Subtitle: Strategies to celebrate local and Indigenous knowledge

  • Authors: Kirsten Maclean

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-323-1

  • Publisher: Springer Singapore

  • eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Social Sciences (R0)

  • Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2015

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-287-322-4Published: 09 March 2015

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-981-10-1213-6Published: 23 October 2016

  • eBook ISBN: 978-981-287-323-1Published: 07 February 2015

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XIX, 215

  • Number of Illustrations: 8 b/w illustrations, 10 illustrations in colour

  • Topics: Social Sciences, general

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