The Basler Afrika Bibliographien and Dr. James Merron invite you to a Book Launch and Conversation with Prof. Elísio Macamo (University of Basel) on Building Trust, Situating Repair: An Ecology of Action in a South African Nature Reserve.

“By understanding trust in terms of repair we will be able to better understand the historical and material forces that structure a particular situation.”

The hybrid event opens up a conversation about the role of concepts, theories, and methods in building research objects.

On the Book

Nature conservation is often framed as an ecological problem in need of repair. With both material and discursive dimensions, repairing things involves repairing people’s orientation to those things. As such, nature conservation can be understood as a negotiation between different orientations to ecological problems. This publication seeks to understand the negotiation through trust, the analysis of which situates repair in a particular setting. Empirically, the book is structured around an encounter that unfolded over the course of a single day between white
commercial farmers and experts belonging to various government departments, universities and an NGO working in a South African nature reserve. By moving through the situation sequence-by-sequence the author captures the relationship between trust and repair vis-à-vis the material forces that structured the situation, and the discursive methods that actors used to repair a degraded ecology.

Zoom link registration for the discussion: kindly write to Dag Henrichsen dh@baslerafrika.ch

Followed by a Happy Hour of “Vinyl Listening—Namibian tracks” presented by Raffaele Perniola Roulet (MA, University of Basel).