Convenors:
Hannah Brown, Durham UK hannah.brown@durham.ac.uk
Justin Willis, Durham UK
Ruth Prince, Oslo Norway;
Salome Bukachi Nairobi, Kenya
Andrea Kaiser-Grolimund, Basel Switzerland
Summary:
This stream invites panel proposals from different disciplinary backgrounds from scholars who are interested in exploring the impacts of changing economies in Africa on environments and understandings of health and wellbeing, including the health of animals and other living things as a well as humans. Panels may consider impacts and experiences of extractive economies, changing forms of agriculture or farming, or the ways that living capital (as plants, foodstuffs, animals) features in shifting economic and non-economic registers of value. Panels may explore the impacts of climate change on people’s livelihoods, or how visions for possible futures or the ‘good life’ are changing under contemporary economic conditions and shifting possibilities for getting by. They may focus on emerging health concerns linked to some of these new economic practices, such as questions of anti-microbial resistance in farming or soil degradation and depletion linked to extractive agriculture and the intensive use of agrochemicals. This panel will be of interest to people attending the ASA meeting who wish to explore the so-called ‘planetary health’ interface, as well as scholars interested in emerging economic practices and the ways these are entangled in questions of climate, environment and wellbeing.
Panel One
Contested Values of Multispecies Livelihoods in Africa
Convenors, Jack Jenkins, Hannah Brown
This panel explores what happens when the multiple and often competing values assigned to different living things in Africa come into conflict. Across the continent, wild and domestic animals occupy important yet differing registers of value – as food, source of income, cultural resource, biosecurity risk, conservation concern, and object of care and relationship, sometimes simultaneously. These registers of value do not always sit easily alongside one another. A species which possesses value as an object of conservation by virtue of its threatened status may also hold significant economic value in hunting communities, or as a culturally important source of meat to urban consumers. Pesticides that improve plant growth may cause longer term damage to soils. Livestock whose meat and milk sustain a pastoral economy may also pose risks of disease requiring public health management which might disrupt the very practices on which that economy depends. And processes of change such as commercialisation, urbanisation, ecological change, and changing market access may create new opportunities and constraints which mean that different values and conflicts between them grow or diminish over time. Papers in this panel will ask how people navigate these competing valuations in their everyday lives and livelihoods, how the friction between them is managed or left unresolved, and what the consequences are for health, environment, and wellbeing.
Panel Two
Managing health beyond the human
Convenors Andrea Kaiser Grolimund, Salome Bukachi, Justin Willis
This panel considers how changing economic arrangements between humans, animals and other living things become the object of governmental attention and investment. Rural and urban settings in Africa are undergoing an economic transformation that is characterised by increasingly extractive forms of farming and agriculture and a rise in concerns about shared health outcomes across different species and environments, particularly in the context of climate change pressures. These shifts are accompanied by new forms of governance and changes in the ‘projectified’ landscape of development that has long shaped the continent. This panel invites papers that explores this landscape and its histories, including through papers that focus on the delivery of One Health interventions that seek to tackle interconnected health concerns across species; new ’social enterprise’ projects that seek to support the development of specific ‘value chains’; commercialised farming projects envisaged and delivered by the state and other governmental agencies; interventions that seek to manage AMR and other cross-species health concerns; or relationships; and related topics.
