Building Trust, Situating Repair
- Foreword by Elísio Macamo
- Language: English
- Vol. 15, 2023
- ISBN 978-3-906927-52-7
- eISBN 978-3-906927-53-4
- ISSN 2296-6986
- eISSN 2297-444X
Building Trust, Situating Repair
pre-order nowNature 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.
James Merron is a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for African Studies Basel, Switzerland. He works collaboratively as part of the Aesthetics from the Margins project, which explores how people on the geopolitical periphery sense and make sense of the world. James utilizes science studies and ethnomethodology to frame his research.