I was born and raised in South Africa, and it is hard to tell a true story about who I am and what drives me without reference to the beautiful and complicated country whose contrasts and contradictions have made a huge impression on me and the path I have taken. My life and career have been shaped by these striking contrasts – exquisite landscapes, rich cultural and ecological diversity, and a progressive constitution, all shadowed by a painful history of colonialism and Apartheid; a legacy very much felt in the present. Racism remains deeply embedded both structurally and in the nuance of everyday interactions. South Africa is the most unequal society in the world, with 42% of the population unemployed or discouraged from seeking work.
Photo credit: Johnny Miller
Amidst these challenges, there is a fierce resolve among many who call South Africa home to build a more just, caring, and sustainable society. I’ve been fortunate to find community in these spaces, fueling my passion for participatory action research and social and environmental justice. My experiences in various civil society spaces have driven me to critically reflect on how I can contribute to creating more emancipatory spaces for change, which entails the work of self-reflection, reckoning with one’s own privilege and positionality, and role in structural injustices. It has been a journey of stumbling, soul searching … keep showing up, learning, and growing.
South Africa as a Case to Explore Conservation Data Justice
South Africa’s diverse natural landscapes, featuring three of the world’s biodiversity hotspots and high levels of endemism, coupled with its history of grappling with justice, make it a critical case for studying conservation data justice. For generations these miraculous landscapes, world famous national parks, and natural resources, were the purview of only a minority racial elite, and arguably their governance today continues to exclude the majority from accessing and benefiting from them. The 1913 and 1936 land acts, which allocated only about 13% of the land to Black South Africans, have left a lasting legacy, shaping race, class, and gender relations.
The Land Restitution Policy Framework aims to address the history of forced removals from conservation areas. However, reconciling land reform with conservation objectives remains challenging. The prevailing conservation paradigm unfortunately does not, in many cases, promote socially and ecologically just management of land. Too often, the resulting scenarios in the settlement of these land claims, overlooks alternative land uses like pastoralism and fails to prioritize the worldviews and ways of being of indigenous people and claimant communities.
I am honoured to join such a wonderful and dynamic team to contribute to the CONDJUST Project. One of the first research projects I am planning will explore epistemic communities influencing policy on land degradation and desertification, particularly how these debates intersect with land reform and conservation priorities. I am interested in understanding what data uncertainties exist in the development of land degradation models and what opportunities exist to encourage more interdisciplinary collaboration and the integration of other forms of knowledge into models, including pastoralists ‘ethno-ecological knowledge’. In close collaboration with researchers and organisations working in the region, I will explore this through the case study of pastoralism and rangeland management in the Namaqualand Succulent Karoo Biodiversity Hotspot. I will explore various perceptions of the relative responsibility of ‘overgrazing’ versus climatic and other local ecological drivers in the degradation process in this region. I also hope to keep learning more about participatory methods during this postdoc and to explore the use of participatory video to create dialogue and opportunities to problem solve between different epistemic communities.
Navigating the complex social dynamics of land relations has shaped my interest in interdisciplinary research. It requires embracing the unknown and finding collaborative ways to share across diverse knowledge systems, and encouraging and supporting others to step into the same uncomfortable spaces. I have a deep conviction that creating kinder more encouraging spaces is the way forward to opening up our creative capacity to problem solve across disciplines and cultural diversity, and that these spaces can be simultaneously rigorous and caring. I hope to bring this ethos to the CONDJUST project in my work with epistemic communities.
My Journey with Land Issues
One of my first jobs facilitating environmental education programmes with a NGO called the Earthchild Project left a lasting impression on me, especially the subtler (but profound) impacts of their work with youth to reclaim nature for those historically alienated from this heritage. I was able to pursue my interest in land issues more thoroughly during my MSc in Social Policy and Development in 2011/2 at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where my thesis focused on payments for ecosystem services in the context of land reform. When I returned to South Africa I worked as an evaluation consultant where I collaborated on and led several public-sector evaluations, mostly focused on rural development programmes and land reform, but also on action research projects in the public health sector in rural areas.
I completed my PhD in 2018 at the Institute for Poverty, Land, and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape. I had the great privilege of having Professor Ben Cousins as a supervisor, 10 years on he remains an important mentor, and his commitment to policy-oriented research and activism is a great source of inspiration. My PhD investigated large-scale agricultural investments between agribusiness firms and customary landowners in the communal areas of the former ‘homelands.’ I explored their impacts on livelihoods, land use, and rights, particularly through the lens of social differentiation and agrarian change. The opportunities afforded to me during my PhD through Ben’s reading groups, and learning from many leading scholars in the Marxist agrarian political economy and political ecology fields, has been a great influence on my adoption and writing on these methods, and my own attempts to develop practical class-analytic approaches.
Another notable project involved designing models for employment-intensive land reform for small-scale farmers during my time as a postdoctoral research associate at PLAAS, funded by the EU and the South African National Treasury. The photo below is taken at a fresh produce market as part of a case study I led to design models for employment-intensive land reform in Limpopo Province. I also conducted other national commodity studies to support small-scale farmers.
Over the years, my ethnographic research in these unequal landscapes has reinforced the notion of land and nature having profound emancipatory value, as integral to understanding our humanity, sense of place, and way of being. Decisions around land use can thus never be merely economic, or exclusively focused either on conserving species or supporting livelihoods; there is much more at stake. I have written about the value of land to social reproduction and in maintaining life, social meanings, and solidarities in all their complexity with my co-authors in a recent publication in the Journal of Agrarian Change.
I also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Global Sustainable Development at the University of Sheffield, where I worked on the AfriCultuReS project. This experience deepened my interest in political ecology and data justice. The project, which used remotely sensed data to inform decision-making on agriculture and food security across eight African countries, highlighted the complexities and uncertainties of such data and how it can misrepresent complex social and ecological realities. In our attempts to facilitate co-design with end users, it became apparent just how challenging it is to integrate various world views and to respond to the specificities and diversity of smallholder production systems, some of which we wrote about here.
My growing interest with remote sensing led me to critically analyze Index-Based Agricultural Insurance. Through a Science by Women Senior Research Fellowship funded by Fundación Mujeres Por África, and hosted at ICTA-UAB, I was able to explore the epistemic communities underpinning these technological revolutions in African agriculture. During this fellowship I also collaborated with colleagues at ICTA-UAB on a publication we are currently revising for publication in Conservation Biology analyzing epistemic communities writing about neoliberal conservation.
Personal Passions and Future Directions
As a woman in a country with one of the highest rates of gender-based violence, this has forged a strong affinity of common cause with all women and a dedication in my career to research and activism on woman’s rights, care work, and gender mainstreaming… and more recently a fascination with the emancipatory prospects of ecofeminism. My passion for public health has also led me to work on action research projects related to maternal and child health with the Black Sash Human Rights Organisation, and on a number of projects and publications focused on improving sexual and reproductive health and wellbeing for adolescent girls and young women with the South African Medical Research Council.
Now, as a mother of a two-year-old daughter, these issues are closer to my heart than ever. Research on unpaid “care work” in social reproduction theory, which has long fascinated me, has taken on a personal dimension. How to create a world more supportive of the physical and emotional needs of children and their families, preoccupies my mind. I am also interested in exploring gender-disaggregated data for modeling and how incorporating a gender lens can lead to different choices in modelling for conservation and thus different prioritisation outcomes, for example. I like to think that the range of research interests I have keeps my mind open to the bigger picture, and to the interdisciplinary solutions required to tackle the complex challenges we face in creating a kinder, more sustainable and thriving world for the next generation.
When I’m not working on CONDJUST, you’ll likely find me exploring the Barcelona countryside and all its playgrounds with my spirited toddler, climbing in a crag or on a boulder somewhere beautiful with my partner, walking, generally just being in nature (as a human-being rather than a human-doing), or on my yoga mat.