[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?