Tafadzwa Mushonga
Contact & links
Biography
Currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria, in South Africa. Tafadzwa leads the Environmental Humanities research project on Extraction in Africa. Her broad interests are in the politics of forest and nature conservation, and broader political ecologies of protected forests in Africa. Tafadzwa’s research examines various aspects of nature-state-people relations within their political, economic, social, and historical contexts. Most fundamentally, she is interested in empirically investigating state violence in relation to forest and nature conservation, and more recently, the conservation-extraction paradox. Tafadzwa is co-editor of two edited volumes: The Violence of Conservation in Africa: State, Militarization, Alternatives, and Environmental Humanities of Extraction in Africa and several journal articles on the violence of conservation.
Research
- Political ecologies of protected forests in Africa
- Conservation-extraction paradox
- Alternative models to fortress conservation
Research methods and approaches
My research predominantly uses qualitative research methods
- Oral histories, interviews, focus groups, ethnography, participant observation. Participatory rural appraisal
Case study approaches
Analysis usually involves
- Document analysis
- discourse analysis
- narrative analysis
- historical analysis
- stakeholder/actor analysis
- instituonal anaylsis
What are you looking for
- Technical skills in visual methods (photovoice, participatory photography)
- Conservation biologists and ecologists to better connect ecological data with political ecology
- Geographers and GIS specialists for collaborations on cover change studies, remote sensing of forest loss, and mapping conflict zones
- Legal scholars for collaborations on legal political ecologies of protected area legislation, community land rights, conservation law and biodiversity policies.
Research discipline: Social Sciences
Cohort year: 2024
Programme: Crucible Programme