Decolonising spaces of knowledge production: Mpala research centre in Laikipia County, Kenya

Abstract

In this article we discuss Mpala Research Centre in Laikipia County, Kenya as a distinctly colonial space. Drawing on historical materials, fieldwork observations and in-depth interviews, we build an account of British colonial expropriation of land, European and American modes of enclosure, and the development of a prominent site of knowledge production in the fields of ecology, conservation and evolutionary biology. Mpala is product and productive of colonial relations, ones where land use serves mainly Western interests in ways that sustain and entrench categories of coloniser/colonised. We support this claim by identifying three ways in which colonial legacies endure at Mpala in terms of (i) ontology, or the particular ways in which land is made landscape; (ii) race and the organisation of space and labour and (iii) silence (and silencing) as a mechanism that sustains colonial power relations. We further argue that turning to such a nameable site of contemporary academic extraction enables a shift from postcolonial critique to decolonial praxis. By naming Mpala in specific terms, the possibility of politics opens out from critical analysis towards a project of undoing the epistemological and material legacies of colonialism.

Decolonising ecological research: A generative discussion between Global North geographers and Global South field ecologists

“…If this is only anecdotally true in Geography—where, for instance, core concerns (e.g., poverty, segregation, inequality) are more enthusiastically identified in the Global South (e.g., in Mumbai, São Paulo) than in the North (e.g., Detroit, Glasgow, St Denis)—then it is pronouncedly the case in ecology where research forms around the greater biodiversity found in the ‘tropics’ (Feeley & Stroud, 2018). As Raby (2017) has shown, the mobilities and facilities that enable research in these areas did not grow organically, nor are they sustained outside of geopolitical power relations; through European colonialism, the Cold War, and American imperialism, ecological research is shot through with different constellations of North bearing on South: coloniser on colonised, First on Third World, and so forth (see also Griffiths et al, 2023). This orientates the discipline in a very specific way: ‘why are there scientific journals, professional associations, and research institutions devoted to tropical biology while ‘temperate biology’ remains an unmarked category?’ (Raby, 2017).…”