natural resource management

Intelligences

Map Making: Mobilizing Local Knowledge and Fostering Collaboration

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NORA MORALES UAM Cuajimalpa, México SALOMON GONZALEZ UAM Cuajimalpa, México Participatory mapping—the production of maps in a collective way—is a common activity used for planning and decision making in urban studies. It started as a way to empower men and women, usually from rural vulnerable communities threatened by climate change, degradation of their landfills or any other conflict related to access to their land. It has been considered a fundamental instrument to help marginal groups represent and communicate their needs within the territory and augment their capacity to protect their rights. (FIDA, 2011). Why is it that in some cases participatory mapping works and in others fails? Why do these initiatives not trigger local action? Or even end up being counterproductive, when authorities use the map made by locals, to validate their points, causing conflict instead of negotiation? As a research team of designers and social scientists involved in the creation of participatory mapping workshops, our goal was to analyze...

Intelligences

A Prairie Home Revival

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BRIANNA FARBER University of South Carolina Download PDF PechaKucha—This presentation explores the struggle of natural resource conservation within Iowa industrial agriculture through the issue of water quality. I discuss the politics of scientific information, specifically how different powerful players use science to achieve their goals. Science can both reveal and obscure the history of Iowa’s landscape, and history holds the key to understanding water quality problems. Finally, I describe what people are trying to do to bring industrial agriculture and prairie together to create a better system. Keywords: Natural resource management, political ecology, agriculture Brianna Farber is a doctoral candidate at the University of South Carolina finishing 14 months of fieldwork in Iowa. Her research interests include human-environment interactions, as well as the role of social science in collaborating with and informing natural science and technology. 2016 Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings, p. 539, ISSN 1559-8918, https://www.epicpeople.org...