ACCESS Seminar: Coastal Human Ecology for Marine Conservation

Abstract

Coastal human ecology (CHE) is a mixture of different theoretical and thematic approaches straddling between the humanities and social and natural sciences which studies human and coastal/marine interactions at the local-scale and through intense fieldwork. In this presentation I will review various approaches in CHE and their value for marine conservation, drawing particularly from my own experience in applied and theoretical work in various countries of the world.

Biography

Shankar Aswani Canela, Professor at Rhodes University, South Africa works across various fields in the natural and social sciences. His research has focused on a diversity of subjects including property rights and common property resources, marine IEK/ethnobiology, vulnerability and resilience of coastal communities, human behavioral ecology of fishing, economic anthropology, tourism, ethnohistory, historical and applied anthropology. He has also been involved in various applied projects, more notably designing and establishing marine conservation programs in Oceania. Currently he is heading projects in Tanzania, Seychelles, Madagascar, South Africa, and the Canary Islands (Spain) among other countries.