Sian Sullivan
Biographic Data
| ID | 3616710 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sian Sullivan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sian |
| FAMILY NAME | Sullivan |
| SIGNATURE | SULLIVAN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bath Spa University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 647 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
What's Ontology Got to Do with It? On the Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Environmental Anthropology
Ontology as a form of enquiry asks questions regarding the nature of being, so as to make assertions regarding the nature of reality and how this can legitimately be known. Ontology denotes what entities may exist, into what categories they can be sorted, and by what practices and methods they can be known (i.e., epistemology). A cross-cultural perspective affirms that cultural and historical differences create the possibility for plural ontologi…
Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast
Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast examines the conservation histories and concerns of one of southern Africa’s most iconic conservation regions: the variously connected ‘Etosha-Kunene’ areas of north-central and north-west Namibia. This cross-disciplinary volume brings together contributions from a Namibian and international group of scholars and conservation practitioners, working on topics ranging from colonial histories to water management, per…
Conservation, Markets & the Environment in Southern and Eastern Africa
CBNRM, national parks, elites, and ethnography
I respond to a recently published article in Ecology and Society, namely “Can the center hold? Boundary actors and marginality in a community-based natural resource management network” (Snorek and Bolger 2022). I provide additional information for three dimensions of this article: (1) historical context regarding the different and varied roots of contemporary marginalization of peoples along the !Khuiseb River, (2) the positioning and framing of …
Protest, Conflict and Litigation
Book synopsis: Anthropologists know that conservation often disempowers already under-privileged groups, and that it also fails to protect environments. Through a series of ethnographic studies, this book argues that the real problem is not the disappearance of "pristine nature" or even the land-use practices of uneducated people. Rather, what we know about culturally determined patterns of consumption, production and unequal distribution, sugges…
Densities of meaning in west Namibian landscapes
Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis
Climate change negotiations have failed the world. Despite more than thirty years of high-level, global talks on climate change, we are still seeing carbon emissions rise dramatically. This edited volume, comprising leading and emerging scholars and climate activists from around the world, takes a critical look at what has gone wrong and what is to be done to create more decisive action. Composed of twenty-eight essays-a combination of new and re…
A faultline in neoliberal environmental governance scholarship? Or, why accumulation-by-alienation matters
This article identifies an emerging faultline in critical geography and political ecology scholarship by reviewing recent debates on three neoliberal environmental governance initiatives: Payments for Ecosystem Services, the United Nations programme for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries and carbon-biodiversity offsetting. These three approaches, we argue, are characterized by varying degrees of c…
Towards a metaphysics of the soul and a participatory aesthetics of life
Towards a meTaphysics of The soul and a parTicipaTory aesTheTics of life: mobilising foucaulT, affecT and animism for caring pracTices of exisTence
On possibilities for salvaged polyphonic ecologies in a ruined world
Invited commentary on A.L. Tsing's 'The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins' (2015), Princeton University Press, ISBN 9780691162751.
On 'Natural Capital', 'Fairy Tales' and Ideology
Review essay for Dieter Helm's 'Natural Capital: Valuing the Planet'. London: Yale University Press, 2015. 277 pp. £20 hardback, £12.99 paperback
What's ontology got to do with it? On nature and knowledge in a political ecology of the 'green economy
Contemporary market-based (i.e. neoliberal) 'green economy' approaches to environmental degradation emphasise exchanges whereby quantified units of environmental harm are traded or 'offset' for compensating units of environmental health. Also encouraged is a view that economic growth can be 'greened' through 'decoupling' economic value from material ecological realities. Such approaches tend to frame biophysical natures in terms of aggregates, su…
What’s ontology got to do with it?
Ontology as a form of enquiry asks questions regarding the nature of being so as to make assertions regarding the known nature of reality and how this can be legitimately known. A cross-cultural perspective affirms that cultural and historical differences create the possibility for plural ontologies. It suggests the parallel existence of different ways of understanding how reality is constructed, how the world and its entities can be known, and w…
Nature on the Move III
Global environmental justice and biodiversity conservation
This paper explores the potential for an environmental justice framing to shed new light on conservation controversies. We argue that, in order to make such progress, environmental justice analysis will need to provide a 'difference-friendly' conception of justice and that this will necessarily involve moving beyond dominant liberal conceptions of distributional fairness. We are largely welcoming of global deployments of distributive justice prin…
Banking Nature? The Spectacular Financialisation of Environmental Conservation
In this paper I emphasise the financialisation of environmental conservation as 1. the turning of financiers to conservation parameters as a new frontier for investment, and 2. the rewriting of conservation practice and nonhuman worlds in terms of banking and financial categories. I introduce financialisation as a broadly controlling impetus with relevance for environmental conservation. I then note ways in which a spectacular investment frontier…
Towards a Synthesized Critique of Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation
Duffy
"Living among "Things of Value
Conservation is sexy! What makes this so, and what does this make? An engagement with Celebrity and the environment
This essay offers an engagement with Daniel Brockington's (2009) recent book Celebrity and the environment. I highlight the book's contribution to debate regarding processes of human displacement arising through biodiversity conservation under conditions of neoliberal capitalism. I first situate the book in relation to contemporary perspectives on displacement, justice, and human rights, using examples to illustrate complex and dynamic patterns o…
Comparing Alternative Media in North and South
Alternative media form an important part of the global mediascape. Research on this phenomenon is, however, often drawn from studies in the 'global North'. In this paper we discuss alternative media in the 'global South', by exploring two case studies of cooperation between Northern and Southern partners: IFIWatchnet in South America, and Indymedia Centre in Africa. We highlight how Northern and Southern partners differed in identity, organizatio…
Rhythm and timing of movement in performance
Elephant in the Room? Problematising ‘New’ (Neoliberal) Biodiversity Conservation
As argued recently in Forum for Development Studies, a ‘back to the barriers’ approach to biodiversity conservation is again prevalent, after some two decades of emphasis on ‘community-based’ initiatives. This involves the establishment and expansion of national parks from which people are variously excluded. In this article, however, I suggest that community-based approaches such as Community-Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM) remain imp…
Ethnographies of Conservation
Political Ecology
Book synopsis: This important new book offers a state-of-the-art examination of political ecology, its evolution as an academic subject, and how environmental knowledge is used in the realm of global international politics. Focusing on the development of environmental knowledge with particular regard to the developing world, the book above all explores the discrepancies between environmental policies implemented by domineering international bodie…
Towards a Synthesized Critique of Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation
Duffy
Banking Nature? The Spectacular Financialisation of Environmental Conservation
In this paper I emphasise the financialisation of environmental conservation as 1. the turning of financiers to conservation parameters as a new frontier for investment, and 2. the rewriting of conservation practice and nonhuman worlds in terms of banking and financial categories. I introduce financialisation as a broadly controlling impetus with relevance for environmental conservation. I then note ways in which a spectacular investment frontier…
Global environmental justice and biodiversity conservation
This paper explores the potential for an environmental justice framing to shed new light on conservation controversies. We argue that, in order to make such progress, environmental justice analysis will need to provide a 'difference-friendly' conception of justice and that this will necessarily involve moving beyond dominant liberal conceptions of distributional fairness. We are largely welcoming of global deployments of distributive justice prin…
What's ontology got to do with it? On nature and knowledge in a political ecology of the 'green economy
Contemporary market-based (i.e. neoliberal) 'green economy' approaches to environmental degradation emphasise exchanges whereby quantified units of environmental harm are traded or 'offset' for compensating units of environmental health. Also encouraged is a view that economic growth can be 'greened' through 'decoupling' economic value from material ecological realities. Such approaches tend to frame biophysical natures in terms of aggregates, su…
Elephant in the Room? Problematising ‘New’ (Neoliberal) Biodiversity Conservation
As argued recently in Forum for Development Studies, a ‘back to the barriers’ approach to biodiversity conservation is again prevalent, after some two decades of emphasis on ‘community-based’ initiatives. This involves the establishment and expansion of national parks from which people are variously excluded. In this article, however, I suggest that community-based approaches such as Community-Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM) remain imp…
Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis
Climate change negotiations have failed the world. Despite more than thirty years of high-level, global talks on climate change, we are still seeing carbon emissions rise dramatically. This edited volume, comprising leading and emerging scholars and climate activists from around the world, takes a critical look at what has gone wrong and what is to be done to create more decisive action. Composed of twenty-eight essays-a combination of new and re…
Conservation is sexy! What makes this so, and what does this make? An engagement with Celebrity and the environment
This essay offers an engagement with Daniel Brockington's (2009) recent book Celebrity and the environment. I highlight the book's contribution to debate regarding processes of human displacement arising through biodiversity conservation under conditions of neoliberal capitalism. I first situate the book in relation to contemporary perspectives on displacement, justice, and human rights, using examples to illustrate complex and dynamic patterns o…
Towards a metaphysics of the soul and a participatory aesthetics of life
Towards a meTaphysics of The soul and a parTicipaTory aesTheTics of life: mobilising foucaulT, affecT and animism for caring pracTices of exisTence
On 'Natural Capital', 'Fairy Tales' and Ideology
Review essay for Dieter Helm's 'Natural Capital: Valuing the Planet'. London: Yale University Press, 2015. 277 pp. £20 hardback, £12.99 paperback
Comparing Alternative Media in North and South
Alternative media form an important part of the global mediascape. Research on this phenomenon is, however, often drawn from studies in the 'global North'. In this paper we discuss alternative media in the 'global South', by exploring two case studies of cooperation between Northern and Southern partners: IFIWatchnet in South America, and Indymedia Centre in Africa. We highlight how Northern and Southern partners differed in identity, organizatio…
Rhythm and timing of movement in performance
Political Ecology
Book synopsis: This important new book offers a state-of-the-art examination of political ecology, its evolution as an academic subject, and how environmental knowledge is used in the realm of global international politics. Focusing on the development of environmental knowledge with particular regard to the developing world, the book above all explores the discrepancies between environmental policies implemented by domineering international bodie…
Ethnographies of Conservation
Elephant in the Room? Problematising ‘New’ (Neoliberal) Biodiversity Conservation
As argued recently in Forum for Development Studies, a ‘back to the barriers’ approach to biodiversity conservation is again prevalent, after some two decades of emphasis on ‘community-based’ initiatives. This involves the establishment and expansion of national parks from which people are variously excluded. In this article, however, I suggest that community-based approaches such as Community-Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM) remain imp…
Rhythm and timing of movement in performance
Conservation is sexy! What makes this so, and what does this make? An engagement with Celebrity and the environment
This essay offers an engagement with Daniel Brockington's (2009) recent book Celebrity and the environment. I highlight the book's contribution to debate regarding processes of human displacement arising through biodiversity conservation under conditions of neoliberal capitalism. I first situate the book in relation to contemporary perspectives on displacement, justice, and human rights, using examples to illustrate complex and dynamic patterns o…
Comparing Alternative Media in North and South
Alternative media form an important part of the global mediascape. Research on this phenomenon is, however, often drawn from studies in the 'global North'. In this paper we discuss alternative media in the 'global South', by exploring two case studies of cooperation between Northern and Southern partners: IFIWatchnet in South America, and Indymedia Centre in Africa. We highlight how Northern and Southern partners differed in identity, organizatio…
Banking Nature? The Spectacular Financialisation of Environmental Conservation
In this paper I emphasise the financialisation of environmental conservation as 1. the turning of financiers to conservation parameters as a new frontier for investment, and 2. the rewriting of conservation practice and nonhuman worlds in terms of banking and financial categories. I introduce financialisation as a broadly controlling impetus with relevance for environmental conservation. I then note ways in which a spectacular investment frontier…
Towards a Synthesized Critique of Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation
Duffy
"Living among "Things of Value
Global environmental justice and biodiversity conservation
This paper explores the potential for an environmental justice framing to shed new light on conservation controversies. We argue that, in order to make such progress, environmental justice analysis will need to provide a 'difference-friendly' conception of justice and that this will necessarily involve moving beyond dominant liberal conceptions of distributional fairness. We are largely welcoming of global deployments of distributive justice prin…
Nature on the Move III
What’s ontology got to do with it?
Ontology as a form of enquiry asks questions regarding the nature of being so as to make assertions regarding the known nature of reality and how this can be legitimately known. A cross-cultural perspective affirms that cultural and historical differences create the possibility for plural ontologies. It suggests the parallel existence of different ways of understanding how reality is constructed, how the world and its entities can be known, and w…
On 'Natural Capital', 'Fairy Tales' and Ideology
Review essay for Dieter Helm's 'Natural Capital: Valuing the Planet'. London: Yale University Press, 2015. 277 pp. £20 hardback, £12.99 paperback
What's ontology got to do with it? On nature and knowledge in a political ecology of the 'green economy
Contemporary market-based (i.e. neoliberal) 'green economy' approaches to environmental degradation emphasise exchanges whereby quantified units of environmental harm are traded or 'offset' for compensating units of environmental health. Also encouraged is a view that economic growth can be 'greened' through 'decoupling' economic value from material ecological realities. Such approaches tend to frame biophysical natures in terms of aggregates, su…
On possibilities for salvaged polyphonic ecologies in a ruined world
Invited commentary on A.L. Tsing's 'The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins' (2015), Princeton University Press, ISBN 9780691162751.
Towards a metaphysics of the soul and a participatory aesthetics of life
Towards a meTaphysics of The soul and a parTicipaTory aesTheTics of life: mobilising foucaulT, affecT and animism for caring pracTices of exisTence
A faultline in neoliberal environmental governance scholarship? Or, why accumulation-by-alienation matters
This article identifies an emerging faultline in critical geography and political ecology scholarship by reviewing recent debates on three neoliberal environmental governance initiatives: Payments for Ecosystem Services, the United Nations programme for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries and carbon-biodiversity offsetting. These three approaches, we argue, are characterized by varying degrees of c…
Densities of meaning in west Namibian landscapes
Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis
Climate change negotiations have failed the world. Despite more than thirty years of high-level, global talks on climate change, we are still seeing carbon emissions rise dramatically. This edited volume, comprising leading and emerging scholars and climate activists from around the world, takes a critical look at what has gone wrong and what is to be done to create more decisive action. Composed of twenty-eight essays-a combination of new and re…
Protest, Conflict and Litigation
Book synopsis: Anthropologists know that conservation often disempowers already under-privileged groups, and that it also fails to protect environments. Through a series of ethnographic studies, this book argues that the real problem is not the disappearance of "pristine nature" or even the land-use practices of uneducated people. Rather, what we know about culturally determined patterns of consumption, production and unequal distribution, sugges…
Conservation, Markets & the Environment in Southern and Eastern Africa
CBNRM, national parks, elites, and ethnography
I respond to a recently published article in Ecology and Society, namely “Can the center hold? Boundary actors and marginality in a community-based natural resource management network” (Snorek and Bolger 2022). I provide additional information for three dimensions of this article: (1) historical context regarding the different and varied roots of contemporary marginalization of peoples along the !Khuiseb River, (2) the positioning and framing of …
Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast
Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast examines the conservation histories and concerns of one of southern Africa’s most iconic conservation regions: the variously connected ‘Etosha-Kunene’ areas of north-central and north-west Namibia. This cross-disciplinary volume brings together contributions from a Namibian and international group of scholars and conservation practitioners, working on topics ranging from colonial histories to water management, per…
What's Ontology Got to Do with It? On the Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Environmental Anthropology
Ontology as a form of enquiry asks questions regarding the nature of being, so as to make assertions regarding the nature of reality and how this can legitimately be known. Ontology denotes what entities may exist, into what categories they can be sorted, and by what practices and methods they can be known (i.e., epistemology). A cross-cultural perspective affirms that cultural and historical differences create the possibility for plural ontologi…
Sociology (13 works) · Political science (12 works) · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management (8 works) · Geography (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Environmental ethics (7 works) · History (7 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (7 works) · Ecology (6 works)