Featuring Dr. Paige West, Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University

When: March 11, 2026,  12pm-1:30pm

Where: WPH B36

Abstract
This lecture examines two decades of collaborative research and practice in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, to advance an anthropological and environmental studies perspective on Indigenous-led conservation. Drawing on long-term partnership with the Indigenous organization Ailan Awareness, Paige West analyzes how conservation is reconfigured as a form of biocultural sovereignty grounded in kinship, relational accountability, spiritual obligation, and community-based governance rather than externally imposed technocratic models. Ethnographic, ecological, and collaborative methodologies illuminate how practices such as ritual revitalization, intergenerational education, and locally designed coastal infrastructures sustain ecological resilience while simultaneously reproducing social, cultural, and moral worlds.

The lecture critically engages political ecology, decolonial theory, and Indigenous studies to address the ethical challenges of collaboration across asymmetries of race, institutional authority, and epistemic power. Rather than treating collaboration as methodological neutrality, it foregrounds kinship, reciprocity, and long-term responsibility as foundational analytic and ethical commitments. This approach challenges dominant conservation paradigms that privilege metrics, scalability, and managerial governance, and instead centers Indigenous epistemologies, sovereignty, and place-based ontologies as constitutive of environmental futures. The lecture contributes to ongoing debates in anthropology and environmental studies concerning knowledge co-production, environmental governance, and the role of culture, spirituality, and relationality in sustaining socio-ecological systems under conditions of climate change and ecological uncertainty.

Bio

Paige West, an endowed professor of anthropology and a Guggenheim Fellow, has collaborated with Indigenous peoples in Melanesia since the 1990s to understand their biodiversity-focused traditions and to conserve their cultures, languages, and environments. She is the author and editor of numerous books and articles and is the co-founder of a conservation-focused NGO and a school in Papua New Guinea.