ANTHMETHGRP3-2425-MARTHA-COSGROVE

[Last modified: December, 5 2024 12:57 PM]

For the Indigenous Identities and Disempowerment case study, there are several ethical considerations to address.

Vulnerability of participants:

…is a crucial element . Indigenous migrants often face displacement, poverty, and violence, making them a highly vulnerable group. Their stories, particularly those involving migration and political oppression, are sensitive. These individuals could face emotional distress, especially when recalling traumatic events. The researcher must be cautious not to exploit their situation and must ensure psychological support is available if necessary.

Confidentiality:

The researcher must protect the anonymity of participants, particularly given the potential for political repercussions. Life histories and personal opinions could expose participants to danger if mishandled, especially in politically charged environments like the Bolsonaro government’s anti-rights stance. The data must be stored securely, anonymised, and participants should be fully aware of how their stories will be used.

Informed consent:

… is also complicated, as it must be clear and culturally appropriate. The research involves interviewing individuals about deeply personal and sensitive topics, and there’s the risk that they might feel coerced or pressured. Some participants might feel that sharing their story could help their cause, so the researcher must emphasise that participation is voluntary and they can withdraw at any time. A power imbalance may exist, with the researcher potentially seen as an outsider, and this could influence the quality of research.

Avoid reinforcing stereotypes:

…or further disempowering the community. There’s also the risk of misrepresentation or exploitation, especially if the research focuses too heavily on the challenges or victimhood of these migrants without considering their agency or resilience. The researcher should present a balanced view of the indigenous struggle, showing not just oppression but also resistance and hope.

Finally, this project should be reviewed by both the Anthropology Ethics Committee and the UCL Research Ethics Committee (REC), given the sensitive political context and the vulnerability of the participants.

[Last modified: November, 26 2024 09:06 AM]

Exploring Gordon Square: A Liminal Space in Early Winter

On a cold but sunny day, my group and I went outside to the benches in Gordon Square, between the archaeology department and the park. It felt like we were sitting on the edge of two worlds: the busy city and the calm, autumn park. The air was cold, but the sun was shining through the leaves, making it look warmer than it really was. We were in this strange in-between space, right at the point where autumn is fading into winter.

We decided to draw what we felt. We made a map of where we could feel the sun and where the cold was. In our drawing (Figure 2), we used crosses to show where the sun hit us, and circles for the cold spots. Some of us felt the cold on our noses, while Mark, who’s bald, felt it on the top of his head! Tarun, clearly freezing, scribbled all over his face to show how cold he was. It was funny,—though the sun was out, we didn’t feel that warm.

Fig. 1

fig. 2

We also wanted to capture the feel of the space. Marie did something cool: she put paper over the bench and rubbed a pencil on it to get the texture of the wood (Figure 1). It was a simple way to feel connected to the place we were sitting.

We also recorded sounds. Mark used his phone to capture the wind rustling through the trees. It sounded like waves crashing on a beach, which made us think how misleading sound can be. The air was cold, but the sound of the wind felt peaceful. It reminded us that sound and feel aren’t always the same.

The sun, the cold, the sounds, and the textures all came together to make a feeling of being in-between seasons, in-between worlds. It wasn’t just about mapping what we saw—it was about feeling it, hearing it, and touching it.

It also made us think about the ethics of ethnography. How do we represent a place without oversimplifying it? How do we show the real experiences of people and spaces, and not just our own perspective? This was a fun but important reminder that even small moments in everyday places can be rich with meaning.

 

 

[Last modified: November, 15 2024 12:46 PM]

For this imaginary scenario I will compare the experience of being on the Tube to being at my pilot project site: The Bialowieza Forest.

Imagining myself in the Białowieża Forest shifts my sense of being in the world entirely. Unlike the Tube, where my body feels restrained by rules, formal ad informal, I picture the forest as the opposite: open, ancient, in areas undisturbed by humans, and teeming with life that doesn’t rely on human order. It would be a space where my body doesn’t just navigate, follow ‘keep right’ signs, or accidentally apologise when someone crashes into me, but becomes deeply aware of its presence in a wider web of deeply entangled forestial relationships.

In the forest, there’s no one telling me how to move or where to go. The absence of signs, announcements, and designated pathways, I suspect, would feel both freeing and unsettling. Walking here, my steps would follow trails created by animals or shaped by the forest itself. I wonder if I would dare make my own path? Why feel a sudden sense of responsibility to reduce myself and my affect in this ‘free for all’ and openly accessible space? To make myself as small as humanly possible, to mimic the rhythms of beetles treading the soil underfoot, to whom my giant step is an earthquake. I imagine I keep to the animals path because I feel I am one amongst them, sharing the Earth we both call home.

Every step is more intentional than the habitual march of city life. Without the screech of trains or automated voices, the soothing sounds of the forest could take over: leaves crunching underfoot, the rustle of branches, the distant call of a bird. My body would tune in to this natural rhythm, slower and less predictable than the mechanical nature and human stampedes of the Tube.

Touch, too, would feel different. In the Tube, avoiding surfaces like handrails feels instinctive—a reaction to the idea of contamination. In Białowieża, I imagine brushing against tree bark or moss, not with hesitation but curiosity. The forest invites a tactile connection, where the textures of the natural world become part of the experience, grounding my body in the present moment.

And yet, much like the Tube, Białowieża carries its own kind of politics. The forest isn’t untouched—it’s a contested space, shaped by centuries of human influence, conservation, and debate over its future. Walking through it, I’d feel the weight of that history and the tension between seeing it as wild and recognising it as a place with its own rules, shaped by both nature and people.

In this imagined walk through Białowieża, my body would be less about performance or routine and more about presence. It would feel small but connected, a part of something far older and larger than me. From feeling squeezed by control mechanisms, I imagine to feel a call to the opposite, to lose control and embrace co-existence and co-construction.

 

[Last modified: November, 1 2024 11:27 AM]

Does the project design include any political positions, orientations or assumptions?

I consider how illegal commercial logging, arguably the most documented environmental crime in Poland, reveals how even the smallest of creatures can ignite a rule of law crisis. The effects of top-down forest governance are omnipresent. Moreover, I assume/prove something that is undeniably limited in relevant literature: that the construction of the border wall in 2022 was also an unconstitutional act and an environmental crime.

I evaluate how the spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus) in the Białowieża forest caused one of the largest EU environmental law controversies regarding the logging industry in Poland. Second, I consider how the Polish environmental rule of law crisis is reinforced by the construction of the border wall. Third, I propose that the border, as an unconstitutional construction, is emblematic of an anthropocentric fascination with sovereignty against transnational legal entities, and how demands for a temporal reorganisation, as exhibited by Rights of Nature (RoN) initiatives, propose an alternative framework for the future protection of the Białowieża.

How does your own positionality interact with these political dimensions?

As an Environmental Anthropologist my fascination with the non-human was something that I wanted to intentionally not glorify, nor focus too much attention on (as a critically realist critique of radical post-humanism). This is because the impoverished social relations (human and not) of the forest were caused by top-down economic and political dynamics that are inherently HUMAN in creation.

However, to deploy and represent this political positionality, despite the significance of top-down implications of law and geopolitics in the forest, I aim to steadily introduce the fundamental idea that no matter the complexity and the scale of the institutions and their human-centric ideological conflicts, it only takes one army of five millimetre beetles to reveal their weaknesses. Non-humans are not yet treated as subjects in international politics or law yet they simultaneously affect it. Intra-human conflicts and institutional fragility are not weaknesses of my seemingly eco-centric argument, but rather integral parts of a multidisciplinary approach.

I hope that this positionality across neo-materialist debates help to disentangle materialist philosophies by favouring the articulation of a more-than-human ontology that decentres the human whilst nonetheless recognising the centrality of humans in the debate.

What are the potential political implications and outcomes of your research findings?

Men seem to be made paradoxically at once responsible and not-responsible for the structures they find themselves in. This is perhaps most relevant for the seemingly fragile governing body of the EU. The border becomes a methodological-theoretical device where once elusive structural devices become concrete walls (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). The very concept of the “human” is fundamentally “a far more complex, interdependent and entangled actuality than is presented/represented by the autonomous, bounded individual assumed by Western legal systems” (Boulot et al., 2021:1). To accept more-than-human ontology and the legal pluralisation of “life worlds,” life forms entangled in “cosmological frameworks” of irrevocable interaction, as argued by Anishinaabe scholar Aaron Mills (2016:850), is to also understand that the human is inextricably linked to the answer.

How might your methods be adapted to account for these political elements?

As this research was centred on the border as a method, International Politics guided my methodology in my research. Now, however, I need to relate this to the methods in Anthropology but I want to keep my ‘political positionality’ the same whilst being able to write an ethnography from the bottom-up without removing the centrality of the international, legal, and geo-political in the issue.

[Last modified: October, 26 2024 10:29 AM]

Field work at ‘Clearly Destiny’

I had no plans to see a medium but clearly Marie had. Walking just five minutes from the Anthropology department, we arrive at Clearly Destiny, and it clearly was. The women, who I recall as Lin, had a pleasant smile as we entered and as we browsed Marie was noticing smells and picking up on the spiritual meanings behind all of the stones, decorations, buddhas and unicorns.  I ask about readings and how much they are, she responds saying that they are 50£ and last 30 minutes. I was surprised but not really. She then provocatively asks, “why?” following shortly along with “we don’t offer help with love life”. I give Marie a quick glare and she saves me with her usual quick response.

As we find out more about Lin’s life, her husband, and her business, we learn a lot about her spiritual philosophy, as well as what she tends to not tell people in order to protect her business.

Business and Spirituality

Without repeating too much from my field notes, I could see how the coldness of business was shadowing her spiritual values. She had a business certificate of the wall that she said was pointless to her business now because it is based on American standards. She spoke of how she explains her work to different kinds of people in varying degrees of truth in order to not scare people. It is clearly a challenge for her to create a welcoming environment for her customers as well as a spiritually radical one for herself and those she wishes to heal ‘seriously’. She also mentioned that her customers would sometimes not like the results of their tarot readings and get quite upset. I then asked, “so would you say there is a certain amount of tension between having happy customers, or a healthy business, and staying true to your spiritual values and teachings?”. She responded very courtly with “no”, yet I felt she had already expressed those tensions through our conversation.

Christianity and Spirituality

In one moment she started reciting a passage from what sounded like the bible. When she finished her short passage she turned around in her chair to face the pair of wings hung up behind her on the wall and shouted “Archangel Michael!”

Archangel Michael is a spiritual warrior and leader of the angels in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and the Baháʼí Faith. Archangel Michael is a champion of justice, healer of the sick, and guardian of the Church. He is often depicted as a warrior with a sword, vanquishing Satan in the form of a dragon.

It would be interesting to explore this relationship further.

Mannerisms/Non-verbal communication

I felt as though she would overt her eyes from us and look into the window near her desk when she would suggest a more radical spiritual philosophy i.e divination, speaking with the dead, life after death etc.

Positionality – the politics of note-taking

I felt incredibly self conscious by her questions regarding my intentions for having a reading. I knew that it was not to learn something new, because I am quite cynical about the powers of spiritual guides in general and because I was coming on this fieldwork note taking exercise to ‘study’ her. It felt wrong not telling her I was going to be writing about her, but then again would I tell her if I was going to write about her in my diary? Obviously in the actual field this ethical line is important but it felt as if telling her why we were interested (especially for me, perhaps Marie would have been more genuine)  would have betrayed her in an odd way, or at least limited the openness of our conversation.

I have also noticed since writing notes after the encounter in pen, and then typing up more thought about it now, that my memory is really very fallible as well as my own perspective (that seems constantly changing). Marie has ‘corrected’ me several times on how i remembered the events, but again I’m not very sure she remembers it crytsal clear either so it’s difficult to tell. Then again, I’m learning that in Anthropology objectivity is very overrated.

 

[Last modified: October, 18 2024 12:38 PM]

What is my research topic?

Exploring the human/non-human relations in the Bialowieza forest as a bordered landscape (both physically, politically, epistemilogically, and ontologically). The use of anthropology as a critique of radical post-human and new-materialist discourses regarding the non-human through the exploration of a concrete site (the border) as the incorportation of a critical realist sentiment to the impact of human contructed bordered landscapes/relations on forestial relations.

why is this of particular interest to you?

• – I have been fascinated by other-than-human social worlds as a way of breaking down barriers within our binary thinking, and studying IP as an undergraduate the concept of borders ad frontiers were fascinating to me particularily in the cognitive dimention.
  – I am also Russian so the impact that the war on Ukraine is having in Europe is also interesting to me, and the ways in which Belarus uses certain practices to instigate unrest in Europe/Poland.
  – Fundamentally, I wrote this dissertation from the perspective of International Politics but in a way that critiqued both top-down approaches (and the environmental rule of law crisis) as well as perspectives from the bottom-up (the literal beetles underfoot or Bison).

What preconceived ideas are you bringing to this research?

• That the conservationists in the region are battling with the Polish government, especially after the appointment of Donald Tusk. Yet, I am also assuming that Tusk has improved the environmental situation in the forest – that, I need to explore further.
• I know that animal migration is affected by the border wall as well as the genetic vulnerability of Bison, but I need to ensure that the situation is still as dire/and that conflicts between Belarussian – Polish ecologists are as bad as I read.

Might your lived experience inform the way you interact with their participants?

• I have limited ecological knowledge so I think I will need more time interacting with people from the natural sciences involved in Bialowieza, and that’s also potentially where my biased interests come in, but I will need to also balance my time with exploring the lives of local people, and political organisers.

Do class, race, gender, sexuality, or other identities inform your approach to the research?

• The positionality of the people who I intend to meet will be of interest to the research because the power relations embued within the forest context are of utmost importance.
• The positionality of the non-human is of particular interest. I will be asking if the non-human has political subjectivity then how relevant is this to this context? Do we not have to be pragmatic about acknowledging our agency above those who are ‘sub-altern’ in the non-human sense – in the unique sense that they cannot ‘speak’ in the human sense?

 

[Last modified: October, 14 2024 07:54 PM]

Were you able to access your research theme through the site you chose?

Not entirely, Gordon Square park has nothing necessarily to do with either of my pilot research proposals although I am very much considering doing it on something else.

How was I not able to/able to?

I was able to explore the ways Londoners (or people in London) use the green space yet my research is based in a different place entirely (rural Russia – I am thinking), so It was not place specific. Moreover, the people I am interested in understanding are not those who frequent Gordon Square. However it was still nice to observe others and I got a feel of what participant observation entails.

what did I record and is it useful?

I recorded that most people simply walked around the park despite the park actually being a shortcut, others rushing through it to get to where they need to be, others (around 50%) sat on their phones or computers, and the few odd people who seemed to be interacting with their environment. I also recorded that most of the trees were non-native species, besides a couple beech trees. I attributed this to the horticultural feel of the park and wondered whether the fact these trees weren’t ‘native’ was wrong of me to judge in the first place. I suppose it just added to the curated feeling of the gardens and the compost that was the property of some UCL science department. It was useful to imagine how an anthropologist often must feel… like they suddenly have to become observers, like aliens landing on earth for the first time even if they’ve been the Gordon Square quite a few times now…

 

what form of recording seemed most productive?

Audio (for conversations) text (for thoughts) and visual (for what was seen).

How did you feel?

I felt awkward observing the people, but there were glimpes of nice-ity like when people would stop and close their eyes at the sun… or when i distracted myself looking at all of the different trees and finding out which plant species they were growing. Overall it was a peaceful exercise.

[Last modified: October, 11 2024 10:54 AM]

(A) Topic Draft: Legal personhood and the issue of translation: Indigenous cosmologies of nature’s personhood v Western legal conceptualisation of legal personhood.

Questions:

How can a convention be established to adjudicate conflicts between nature’s rights and human rights?

Can Anthropologists translate between Indigenous cosmologies of nature’s personhood to the Western legal conceptualisation of legal personhood?

Why are cooperations granted such legal personhood and other other-than-human beings not?

How might anthropological critiques of colonialism help forge better frameworks for protecting nature and local people’s land rights in contexts of settler colonialism and capitalist extraction?

What is wrong with human rights?

What might an anthropological perspective bring to these conversations around the rights of nature movement and nature governance?

What are the roots of ‘rights of nature’ concepts in indigenous cultures and traditions across the world?

How has long-term anthropological work with indigenous communities helped forward this agenda in the domain of global jurisprudence?

How might we better include indigenous and marginalised voices and representatives in these conversations around RoN in national and international legal forums?

Method:

– Explore Anthropological legal narratives

– Immersion into Peoples’ Tribunals, RoN initiatives, performances, as well as into Indigenous perspective. The everyday of peoples experiences. How can ‘learning with’ the world of legal environments, Indigenous environments, environements here in London, and perhaps even my own reveal the complexities, or suggest a creative potential, of this question?

– Consider environmental justice through international rights of nature intiatives, such as the Global Alliance for the RoN, to discover how receptive people are to the idea that nature should be recognised as a legal subject and how effective this may be?

– Consider performances such as the Monsanto Tribunal, ‘landscape as evidence: artist as witness’, museum installations and anthropological research such as ‘forest law’ Biemann, or legal/perfomative re-imaginings such as The Court for International Climate Crisis (CICC) Rhada D’Souza & Jonas Staal.

– Do these story making/performative efforts attend to the issue of the personhood dichotomy?

(B) Topic Draft: What does an ethnographic study of the bordered landscape of the Bialowieza Forest reveal about human-non-human social relations?

The Białowieża Forest is Europe’s last primaeval deciduous forest and its dwindling environment has been increasingly affected by anthropogenic climate change, logging, biodiversity extinction, and habitat loss. This dissertation is concerned with what the recently constructed Polish-Belarus border wall, in this ecologically vulnerable space, means for forestial social relations as well as the impoverished relations between human society and nature more broadly. In order to comprehensively assess the impact of border regimes on the forest landscape I refer to two fundamental understandings of the border, the former focuses on the construction of borders, whereas the latter their deconstruction. In its first and most literal sense, the border is the physical or cartographic demarcation between two nation-states. The second understanding speaks to the methodological viewpoint of the dissertation developed by Mezzadra and Neilson (2013) in Border as Method. It is more abstract and sees borders, or ‘borderscapes’, as epistemological frameworks and methodological devices rather than mere objects of analysis. I ask how, when read together, concrete and abstract bordering notions help to ascertain what novel and heterogeneous kinds of divisions the border wall has created, serving not only as a dividing line between two states but as a barrier separating Europe from Eurasia, ‘illegals’ from citizens, ‘invasives’ from ‘natives’,  political from environmental crises, and humans from non-humans. I ask how ‘thinking the border’ necessitates breaking down borders within our thinking and vice versa, and how ‘more-than-human’ sociality as well as non-human ways of being, can influence ways of knowing and thinking about borders. By entangling theoretical notions of critical border studies, critical posthumanism, multispecies ethnography, and Indigenous knowledge systems with concrete notions of place, natural science, and international relations, the epistemologically abstract can engage with its material context without disconnecting from the socially constructed issues at hand. Contemplating this detachment, I reflect on the potential to adjoin both human and non-human forces to anchor radical post-human, ecocentric theories to radical humanocentric International Politics.

[Last modified: October, 1 2024 06:14 PM]

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