The Department of Geography Speaker Series presents Mara Goldman, University of Colorado, Boulder.
Title:
What does it mean to speak of a global Africa and how does it help to move conversations
regarding nature conservation and rangeland management in new directions? A
Global Africa framing highlights the always multiple combinations of ways of knowing,
doing, and being that exist across Africa and globally, tying together complex chains of
knowl-edge, technologies, and cultures.It alsoputs Africa at the center of both historic
global connections (of people,resources, and knowledge), and a shared global future,
where the climate is uncertain, and new ways of knowing, and being with nature are
sorely needed. My talk today focuses on one particular part of Africa (the semi-arid
rangelands of Tanza-nia and Kenya), and one particular group of people who live there
(Maasai pastoralists/a-gro-pastoralists), who are piecingtogether different ways of
knowing and being with nature in conjunction with Western enforced management
schemes, to make sense of changing social and physical environments. I discuss the
need to recognize, not only these different ways of being knowing and managing
nature otherwise in the East African Savannah lands, but alsothe value of using non-linear
African narrative forms to tell their-stories. African knowledge has long gone
unrecognized in global conservation and developmentwork, despite being central to
much of the labor that makes the work happen on the ground. Today, as scholars look
for new ways of knowing and managing the climate, as well as new framings of nature society
relations, African knowledge and sets of relations provide possibilities to move
in new directions for wildlife conservation and range-land management.
Mara J. Goldman is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, a faculty
fellow in the Institute for Behavioral Sciences, and an a liate faculty in the Gender and
Women’s Studies Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder. She received her PhD in
2006 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (geography) and holds an MS in Conservation
Biology and Sustainable Development also from UW-Madison (2001) as well as an
MA in Geography from the University of California Los Angeles (1998). She was a
post-doctoral fellow at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), in Nairobi,
where she conducted research on “Communication and the Politics of Participation in
Pastoral Societies,” among Maasai communities in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania.
