Transformative change refers to a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values and is purported as the answer to biodiversity loss, climate change and social inequalities. This talk explores how engaging with diverse knowledge systems within conservation could transform conservation and enable conservation to enact transformative change. While the natural sciences remain important for achieving conservation aims, there is increasingly an argument that conservation should engage with diverse knowledges, including the social sciences, humanities, and arts, as well as experiential, local, and Indigenous knowledge. Such plural engagements could make conservation more effective in addressing complex, uncertain, and multi-facted challenges, while also fostering epistemic justice. Although emerging frameworks explore ways to bring plural knowledges together, there is limited understanding of how this might work in practice and, additionally, how power relations are interwoven with, and emerge from, such processes. This talk explores these questions in the UK context.

About the Speaker

Alice Lawrence is a PhD researcher in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, UK. After training as a zoologist, Alice became passionate about using social science methods to co-create a more just and reflexive conservation. She engages with participatory approaches and arts-based methods as part of her work. Alice loves being outside, reading (science fiction at the moment), writing poetry and swimming in the ocean.