Corridor Talk: Conservation Humanities and the Future of Europe's National parks
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Leeds
Department Name: School of English
Abstract
Many of Europe's national parks pose a unique challenge to conservation work, as they are not just historically wild and contested places, but are also sites of more recent geopolitical disputes. Understanding the role these parks play in local perceptions of place, identity, species movements, and human rights of access involves conservation as refracted through multiple languages and cultures: it requires, in short, a humanities-based as well as a scientific-managerial approach. Featuring a team of six researchers, three based at the University of Leeds and three at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) Munich, this project aims to apply interdisciplinary perspectives derived from a new field partly pioneered at Leeds, conservation humanities, which examines the humanistic aspects of biodiversity loss. These perspectives will be used to consider the past, present, and future of four of Europe's most iconic national parks: Wadden Sea National Park, Pyrenees National Park, and Bavarian Forest and Sumava National Parks.
The two key concepts are mobility and boundaries. All four parks either abut or traverse national borders; they thus depend upon negotiated forms of transboundary cooperation that indicate the transnational parameters of conservation itself. All four parks also raise issues of mobility that have political and philosophical underpinnings. Whose freedom is it that is protected in national parks: that of the people who live within their boundaries or that of their resident wildlife? What happens when these ideas of freedom come into conflict? Who or what moves in, across, and beyond national parks, and according to which sets of conservation principles are these intersecting movements - of humans, animals, landscapes, knowledge - to be both practically managed and theoretically understood? Do different designated boundaries - geographical and political, but also notional, as in the species boundary - facilitate or impede these movements, and what happens when such boundaries are transgressed?
Imaginatively combining methods drawn from ecocriticism, animal studies, environmental history, and conservation social science, the project will address these questions in three interrelated work packages. Each focuses on a single species or family (the sandpiper, the brown bear, the bark beetle) but also adopts a 'multispecies' approach involving multiple human-animal entanglements and explores some of the issues (species decline, habitat loss, disease, predation) that these entanglements raise. A fourth work package brings these findings together and assesses their relevance to current and future conservation policy in European national parks. The project's main outputs will be a book, a film, seven co-written articles, and four policy briefs that set out recommendations for future conservation policy with respect to European national parks, both as national institutions and transnational spaces within the overarching context of an ecologically threatened world.
The two key concepts are mobility and boundaries. All four parks either abut or traverse national borders; they thus depend upon negotiated forms of transboundary cooperation that indicate the transnational parameters of conservation itself. All four parks also raise issues of mobility that have political and philosophical underpinnings. Whose freedom is it that is protected in national parks: that of the people who live within their boundaries or that of their resident wildlife? What happens when these ideas of freedom come into conflict? Who or what moves in, across, and beyond national parks, and according to which sets of conservation principles are these intersecting movements - of humans, animals, landscapes, knowledge - to be both practically managed and theoretically understood? Do different designated boundaries - geographical and political, but also notional, as in the species boundary - facilitate or impede these movements, and what happens when such boundaries are transgressed?
Imaginatively combining methods drawn from ecocriticism, animal studies, environmental history, and conservation social science, the project will address these questions in three interrelated work packages. Each focuses on a single species or family (the sandpiper, the brown bear, the bark beetle) but also adopts a 'multispecies' approach involving multiple human-animal entanglements and explores some of the issues (species decline, habitat loss, disease, predation) that these entanglements raise. A fourth work package brings these findings together and assesses their relevance to current and future conservation policy in European national parks. The project's main outputs will be a book, a film, seven co-written articles, and four policy briefs that set out recommendations for future conservation policy with respect to European national parks, both as national institutions and transnational spaces within the overarching context of an ecologically threatened world.
Planned Impact
Impact generated from the project will derive from (1) its public engagement work and (2) its work with a wide range of non-academic partners. The main aim in the first case is to increase public awareness of, but also participation in, contemporary conservation initiatives in European national parks, while the main aim in the second is to forge sustainable alliances with the various professional bodies that are either invested in these initiatives and/or responsible for the management of these parks.
First and foremost, the project team will work closely with the relevant park authorities, all of which are invested in research and have considerable experience of collaborative projects with academics. Three other partners stand out. Bund Naturschutz is the oldest and largest environmental NGO in Bavaria, while the EUROPARC Federation and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), both currently based in Switzerland, are global authorities on the natural world and the measures needed to protect it. We will work with all of these partners, representatives from which will be invited to all of our events and meetings and will be encouraged to co-create the project as it evolves. Still other partners will be involved, for example in the creative industries (for example, in 2021 we aim to show a film at NaturVision, an annual nature film festival in southern Germany). Other examples of collaborative work include a one-day public workshop (2020) in Munich in conjunction with Bund Naturschutz and Bavarian Forest National Park, which will concentrate on practical conservation issues, and a two-day guided field trip (2021), also open to the public, in Pyrenees National Park. 2022 will witness our final conference, which will include mixed activities aimed at a general audience.
All of these events and activities are designed to maximize the impact generated by the project, which also aims to benefit members of the general public: indeed, as noted above one of the project's explicit aims is to increase public recognition of contemporary conservation initiatives in and across Europe's national parks. The project's engagement activities are also aimed at opening up practical opportunities for public involvement, including policy analysis (the 2020 workshop) and citizen science (the 2021 field trip).
Policy work will also be incorporated into the project as a whole, which aims to produce short policy briefs in relation to each of its four work packages. These short reports will register attempts to translate research findings into policy at both national and transnational (European) levels, situated within the context of such current and recent policies as the German Government's 2016 Environment Report and, on the broader European level, the raft of legislation associated with the Natura 2000 network of protected areas. Our work will also integrate with NGO policies: both those associated with local conservation organizations in each site and those developed by European and international organizations such as the IUCN and Rewilding Europe. Our broader aim here is not to provide solutions to the problems of managing national parks, but to raise consciousness of the conservation issues involved in them and to reflect on possible paths forward; as such, our policy work will take the form of recommendations rather than firm principles for policy change.
First and foremost, the project team will work closely with the relevant park authorities, all of which are invested in research and have considerable experience of collaborative projects with academics. Three other partners stand out. Bund Naturschutz is the oldest and largest environmental NGO in Bavaria, while the EUROPARC Federation and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), both currently based in Switzerland, are global authorities on the natural world and the measures needed to protect it. We will work with all of these partners, representatives from which will be invited to all of our events and meetings and will be encouraged to co-create the project as it evolves. Still other partners will be involved, for example in the creative industries (for example, in 2021 we aim to show a film at NaturVision, an annual nature film festival in southern Germany). Other examples of collaborative work include a one-day public workshop (2020) in Munich in conjunction with Bund Naturschutz and Bavarian Forest National Park, which will concentrate on practical conservation issues, and a two-day guided field trip (2021), also open to the public, in Pyrenees National Park. 2022 will witness our final conference, which will include mixed activities aimed at a general audience.
All of these events and activities are designed to maximize the impact generated by the project, which also aims to benefit members of the general public: indeed, as noted above one of the project's explicit aims is to increase public recognition of contemporary conservation initiatives in and across Europe's national parks. The project's engagement activities are also aimed at opening up practical opportunities for public involvement, including policy analysis (the 2020 workshop) and citizen science (the 2021 field trip).
Policy work will also be incorporated into the project as a whole, which aims to produce short policy briefs in relation to each of its four work packages. These short reports will register attempts to translate research findings into policy at both national and transnational (European) levels, situated within the context of such current and recent policies as the German Government's 2016 Environment Report and, on the broader European level, the raft of legislation associated with the Natura 2000 network of protected areas. Our work will also integrate with NGO policies: both those associated with local conservation organizations in each site and those developed by European and international organizations such as the IUCN and Rewilding Europe. Our broader aim here is not to provide solutions to the problems of managing national parks, but to raise consciousness of the conservation issues involved in them and to reflect on possible paths forward; as such, our policy work will take the form of recommendations rather than firm principles for policy change.
Publications
Benest F
(2022)
Travaux actuels d'inventaire des forêts à forte naturalité à l'échelle nationale et européenne
in Revue forestière française
Carruthers-Jones J
(2022)
Routledge Handbook of Rewilding
De Smalen E
(2022)
Corridor Talk: Conservation Humanities and the Future of Europe's National Parks
in Journal of European Landscapes
De Smalen, E, R
(2021)
Sandpipers and the Art of Letting Go: Narratives of Conservation in the Wadden Sea
in Arcadia: Explorations in Environmental History
De Smalen, E.
(2023)
Literature and the Wadden Sea: Teaching coastal environments through literature.
in Coastal Studies & Society
Holmes G
(2021)
Mainstreaming the humanities in conservation
in Conservation Biology
Holmes, G.
(2023)
Governance and conservation effectiveness in protected areas and indigenous and locally managed areas.
in Annual Review of Environment and Resources
Huggan G
(2022)
From the Serengeti to the Bavarian Forest, and back again: Bernhard Grzimek, Celebrity Conservation, and the Transnational Politics of National Parks
in Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment
Ritson K
(2021)
Imagining the Anthropocene with the Wadden Sea
in Maritime Studies
Ritson, K.
(2022)
Perspectives on German Ecocriticism: Introduction
in Oxford German Studies
Šimková, P.
(2023)
Grenzenlos wild? Naturschutz und Grenze im Bayerischen Wald und Šumava.
in Copernico. Geschichte und kulturelles Erbe im östlichen Europa
Description | Research for the Corridor Talk project evolved as it confronted the changing conditions and implications of the Covid-19 pandemic, and probably its most important findings corresponded to shifts during this period, not just in the public perception of national parks, but in the general imagination of place. European national parks rose in importance during the pandemic, and some of them were increasingly frequented; at the same time, public recognition of the conservation and other environmental issues associated with them grew exponentially as well. Charting these shifts, project research helped further educate the public about the value of national parks through, for example, the development of a set of Wadden Sea-based teaching resources, while collaborative work with major environmental organizations such as the IUCN helped produce a wilderness map of the Pyrenees National Park that has since led to a national-level spatial analysis of 'naturalness' in France. The project also produced important historical work, leading to a number of co-authored outputs on, inter alia, the environmental, cultural, and political history of Bavarian Forest and Šumava National Parks. |
Exploitation Route | As noted above, Pyrenees-based transcripts and recordings, incorporated into a wilderness map of the area, are currently being used to develop a national-level spatial analysis of 'naturalness' in France. Wadden Sea-based teaching resources have since been picked up and advertised on the Wadden Sea UNESCO World Heritage website, and opportunities are currently being explored for rolling similar resources out at other national parks. The recently formed (2024) European Conservation Humanities network, incorporating conservation scholars and practitioners from across Europe, will also be taking the work of the Corridor Talk project further, not least in relation to the maintenance and governance of European national parks. |
Sectors | Education Environment Leisure Activities including Sports Recreation and Tourism |
URL | https://conservationhumanities.com/corridor-talk/ |
Description | Discussions on how best to translate our research into formats that will reach those concerned with conservation policy are ongoing. Outputs in this category are varied and include so far: our contribution to the 2021 International Wadden Sea Symposium report, which takes the form of recommendations for conservation and management drawing on research by De Smalen and Ritson, plus the featuring of the http://www.waddensealiterature.com website on its UNESCO Wadden Sea counterpart; Carruthers-Jones' wilderness-map-based collaboration with the French Committee of the IUCN, which helped lead in January 2024 to IUCN France and UNESCO France signing an accord on the national and international importance of rewilding; Holmes' ongoing participation in the Natural England Species Reintroduction Task Force; and Ritson and Carruthers-Jones' work (together with Wild Europe) on a resolution for the upcoming IUCN World Conservation Congress in 2025, which will call for the IUCN European office to incorporate the humanities into conservation thinking and practice in a structured way. Meanwhile, these and other conservation-related issues will continue to be discussed in the European Conservation Humanities Network, newly formed in 2024: a combination of engaged scholars with diverse academic and geographical backgrounds which aims to expand the work of the Corridor Talk project, and which, in either establishing or consolidating working relationships with conservation practitioners across Europe, will address the major conservation challenges of our time. |
First Year Of Impact | 2021 |
Sector | Education,Environment,Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism |
Impact Types | Cultural Societal |
Description | Contribution to an accord on rewilding |
Geographic Reach | National |
Policy Influence Type | Contribution to a national consultation/review |
Impact | Policies on rewilding are still very much at the formative stage, but accords such as the one above will doubtless have a positive impact on sustainable agriculture as well as the maintenance and governance of national parks. |
Description | IUCN World Congress in Marseille and French Protected areas strategy |
Geographic Reach | National |
Policy Influence Type | Contribution to a national consultation/review |
Impact | At the regional level of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, it has already led to the preliminary identification of potential sites for new protected areas in line with the French National Strategy on Protected Areas to 2030 and the EU Biodiversity Policy to 2030, both of which aim to strictly protect 10% land surface within European national borders. Similarly the Conservatoire du Littoral has identified two new sites for purchase based on the map. Stakeholder consultation using some of the mobile methods from Corridor Talk, and in collaboration with the Corridor Talk research team are now planned to explore next steps in the creation of these protected areas. |
URL | https://uicn.fr/cartnat-premier-diagnostic-national-des-aires-a-fort-degre-de-naturalite/ |
Description | Resolution for IUCN World Conservation Congress |
Geographic Reach | Europe |
Policy Influence Type | Participation in a guidance/advisory committee |
Description | European Conservation Humanities Network |
Amount | € 43,986 (EUR) |
Funding ID | 529348290 |
Organisation | German Research Foundation |
Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
Country | Germany |
Start | 02/2024 |
End | 01/2027 |
Description | Collaboration on methodological approaches and practical workshops with Bavarian Forest National Park |
Organisation | Bavarian Forest National Park |
Country | Germany |
Sector | Public |
PI Contribution | Since the inception of the Corridor Talk project, the research team has worked closely with its Bavarian National Park partners to improve understandings of the challenges facing the park. A key theme of the discussions has been how our research is relevant to their knowledge needs and can support more effective decision-making going forward. This has become especially pressing during the COVID-19 crisis, which has seen a change in the demographic of park visitors. More recent Corridor Talk research has involved identifying ongoing conservation challenges in the park, including those associated with human visitors (whose numbers have significantly increased during the period of the pandemic) as well as nonhuman threats (including those posed by bark beetle infestations). Further research has concentrated on looking at historical issues surrounding borders, as the park is situated in 'border country' between southern Germany and what is now the Czech Republic. In situ fieldwork in the park and its surrounding area has been restricted by the pandemic, but a series of activities is planned -- pandemic permitting -- this May (2022) that will bring park staff together with the research team. |
Collaborator Contribution | From the outset of the project, the National Park agreed to share their collective expertise relating to the core themes of Corridor Talk. They also agreed to share project relevant data and communicate their ongoing reflections on the key themes of the project. Direct exchanges between park staff and the research team have been limited so far, mainly because of the pandemic, but should pick up significantly after our upcoming workshop in May (2022). |
Impact | An online workshop was held in November 2020 to further develop individual partnerships and bring the different partners together with the full research team. For details see Engagement Activities. A further workshop, face to face this time, is planned in May this year (2022). |
Start Year | 2020 |
Description | Collaboration on methodological approaches and practical workshops with Pyrenees National Park |
Organisation | Pyrénées National Park |
Country | France |
Sector | Public |
PI Contribution | Since the inception of the project The Corridor Talk team has worked closely with its Pyrenees partners to improve our understanding of the conservation challenges facing the park. A key theme of the discussions has been how our research is relevant to their knowledge needs and can support more effective decision-making going forward. This has become especially pressing during the COVID-19 crisis which has seen a change in the demographic of park visitors and an increase in visitor numbers. |
Collaborator Contribution | The National Park has agreed to share their expertise relating to the core themes of Corridor Talk, and have also agreed to share project-relevant data and communicate their ongoing reflections on the key themes of the project. Last year (2021) park staff made their facilities available for use in a week-long series of face-to-face workshops and open-air activities that involved the entire research team. The specific aim of these activities was to explore research insights from the project's different case studies, and to situate this knowledge in the specific context of Pyrenees National Park. |
Impact | An online workshop was held in November 2020 to further develop individual partnerships and bring the different partners together with the full research team. A week-long series of face-to-face workshops and open-air activities followed in 2021, at various sites within the National Park. For details see Engagement Activities. |
Start Year | 2020 |
Description | Collaboration on methodological approaches and practical workshops with the Wadden Sea Biosphere Reserve. |
Organisation | Wadden Sea National Park |
Country | Denmark |
Sector | Public |
PI Contribution | Since more or less the inception of the project the Corridor Talk team has worked closely with our Wadden Sea partners to improve our understanding of the conservation challenges facing managers within and across the various protected areas that constitute the Wadden Sea Biosphere Reserve. A key theme of the discussions has been how our research is relevant to their knowledge needs and can support more effective decision-making going forward. This has become especially pressing during the COVID-19 crisis, which has seen a change in the demographic of park visitors and an increase in visitor numbers. More recent work has also included workshop-based exchanges on educational matters, e.g. how to use literary and other cultural texts to improve understanding of and raise consciousness about conservation issues. |
Collaborator Contribution | Park managers and other staff have been generous from the outset in sharing their expertise relating to the core themes of Corridor Talk, sharing project-relevant data and communicating their ongoing reflections on the key themes of the project and how these are playing out in the transboundary context of the biosphere reserve. |
Impact | An online workshop was held in November 2020 to help develop individual partnerships, and to bring the different park partners together with the full research team. Since then, most of the exchanges between Corridor Talk researchers and our Wadden Sea partners have revolved around the cultural remit of the Wadden Sea work package, with two educational workshops taking place (inevitably online) over the past year (2021), and a possible summer school to come this year (2022). For further details on these workshops, see Engagement Activities. |
Start Year | 2020 |
Description | Collaboration on methodological approaches and practical workshops with Šumava National Park |
Organisation | Šumava National Park |
Country | Czech Republic |
Sector | Public |
PI Contribution | The Corridor Talk team has worked closely with its Šumava National Park since the beginning of the project to identify the various conservation challenges and political issues that surround the history as well as the contemporary upkeep of the park. A key theme of the discussions has been how our research is relevant to their knowledge needs and can support more effective decision-making going forward. While the pandemic has restricted exchanges between the research team and park staff, these have picked up again more recently, and research over the past few months has included a month spent by project PRDA Pavla Šimková in Prague at the Institute for Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and collaboration with the BOAR ERC project, led by the Institute of Ethnology at the Czech Academy of Sciences. |
Collaborator Contribution | Park staff have agreed to share their expertise relating to the core themes of Corridor Talk, and have also agreed to share project-relevant data and communicate their ongoing reflections on the key themes of the project. |
Impact | An online workshop was held in November 2020 to further develop individual partnerships and bring the different partners together with the full research team. For details see Engagement Activities. For more recent information on collaborative activities, see the section on research collaboration above. |
Start Year | 2020 |
Description | AHRC-DFG showcase event |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Supporters |
Results and Impact | Two members of the Corridor Talk research team (Holmes and Ritson) participated in a showcase event in London on May 12-13 2022. The event, laid on by the two main sponsors of the Corridor Talk project, the AHRC (UK) and the DFG (Germany), showcased the work being done in Corridor Talk and other similarly funded projects and discussed opportunities for future collaboration as well as developments around key concepts in humanities research. Around 100 people attended, including other academics and representatives from both funding agencies, including senior leadership. The event gave these agencies a better insight into the future of interdisciplinary humanities research, particularly within an international context, and the communities it serves. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
Description | Corridor Talk project workshop on research questions, methods and collaboration. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | This workshop, bringing members of the Corridor Talk team together with professional practitioners, focused on three sets of questions, each of which had previously been distributed to the project partners along with a brief information package about the project. (1) To what extent do the Corridor Talk project's main aims and objectives speak to your own, and how might the work done by the Corridor Talk team help you achieve them? (2) Which of these aims and objectives are shared between the participating national parks, and how might the project contribute to these? Which aims and objectives are specific to your particular park? (3) Has the COVID crisis forced you to rethink any of these aims and objectives and/or to come up with new ones? Should the Corridor Talk project be reframed as a result, and if so, how? The discussion focused initially on definitional issues and problems, including the basic criteria for a national park, the historical basis for this designation, and different perceptions - both individual and collective - of the nature and purpose of national parks. It was emphasized that national parks are not only managed in sometimes markedly different ways, but are not necessarily unified entities. It was noted, however, that there were some common concerns, namely the attempt to maintain protected areas and the biodiversity they contained while also capitalizing on their attractiveness to visitors, and the underlying desire in educating these visitors about the importance of nature conservation to effect behavioral change. It was further suggested that more work needed to be done, and perhaps could be done within the project, on generating, analyzing, and comparing updated visitor responses to the parks. This work seemed more necessary than ever, participants agreed, in the context of COVID, although - to amplify the basic difficulties of comparison - it was also remarked that the crisis had had the mixed effect of making some parks more accessible and others more remote. Project partners agreed, however, that the study of animal behavior remained important, and that the project would be able to contribute meaningfully to a number of sometimes thorny debates on predator-prey relationships and the ecological role of invasive species. Similarly, it was agreed that the different kinds of landscapes involved in the parks, which had the capacity to shift from one state to another (notably in the Wadden Sea region), would benefit from a humanities approach that focused on the different values and perceptions bound up in these landscapes, and that reflects their changing social and cultural meanings over time. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
URL | https://conservationhumanities.com/2020/12/04/corridor-talk-workshop/ |
Description | French wilderness mapping |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | The France-based member of the 'Corridor Talk' team (Jonathan Carruthers-Jones) participated in a workshop on French wilderness mapping, which took place in the Reserve naturelle nationale du marais D'Orx on 14-15 December 2022. The workshop, funded by the IUCN, brought together academics, professional practitioners (e.g. park managers), and policymakers to discuss a major ongoing national project of wilderness mapping informed, directly or indirectly, by 'Corridor Talk' work. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
Description | Informal conference workshop ('Conservation Humanities Cafe') |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Two members of the 'Corridor Talk' team (Carruthers-Jones and Simkova) jointly organized a 'Conservation Humanities Cafe' at the ESEH (environmental history) conference in Bristol (UK), 4-8 July 2022. The cafe was an informal workshop aimed at conference delegates, including postgraduate students, many of whom were encountering the new field of conservation humanities for the first time. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
Description | Interview for BBC Radio 3 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Media (as a channel to the public) |
Results and Impact | On February 18 2024, Corridor Talk Co-PI Ritson gave an interview on the BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature, focusing on the environmental implications of Theodor Storm's C19 novella Der Schimmelreiter. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
Description | Keynote address at Europarc conference |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Keynote (online) address by Corridor Talk team member George Holmes at the Europarc Conference, "Parks in the Spotlight", on October 6th, 2021. This was to an audience of about 400 national park managers, NGO managers, and related people, speaking about how the values of conservationists affect the future of conservation. Europarc is the federation of European park managers. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
Description | Podcast - Corridor Talk team interviewed as part of DAAD Cambridge Research Hub for German Studies |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | A one-day workshop on recent developments in ecocritical research in German Studies. The event brought together established experts in the field with early career researchers who presented the latest work on ecocriticism as an emergent theory in German literary criticism. Dr Katie Ritson from the Corridor Talk Project was interviewed about her Corridor Talk work for this podcast, which was sponsored by the DAAD Cambridge Research Hub for German Studies. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
URL | http://www.daad.cam.ac.uk/workshops/ecology-in-german-literary-criticism-recent-developments-and-app... |
Description | Project website |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
Results and Impact | The Corridor Talk website, designed and launched soon after the launch of the project, has developed steadily since then and now features a number of informative articles, book reviews and blogs. While the impact of the website is limited at this stage, it is hoped that user numbers will expand significantly over the course of the project, and there is early evidence that the site is being used by members of the general public as well as academics and professional practitioners in the conservation field. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020,2021,2022 |
URL | https://conservationhumanities.com |
Description | Television interview |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
Results and Impact | The research methods used in Corridor Talk Work Package 2 were filmed on location in the French Pyrenees by a National Television network in France (TF1) and broadcast as part of a 3 minute feature on the evening news (Journal de 20h). This evening slot is watched by on average around 6 million people and was a great opportunity to communicate scientific research to a broader public. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
URL | https://conservationhumanities.com/2021/11/17/iucn-world-congress-marseille-september-2021/ |
Description | Two-day workshop/fieldtrip: Bavarian Forest National Park |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Members of the international research team met up 'on location' for two days (May 31-June 1) in Bavarian Forest National Park, where they consulted with regional park authorities and were also given an illuminating guided tour by a local park ranger in which information relating to the project, especially its Bavarian Forest/Sumava components, was shared. The team also held a full annual general meeting (attended by advisory board members online) in which project findings so far as well as future activities were discussed. A summary blog post was later contributed to the project website (see URL below). |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
URL | https://conservationhumanities.com |
Description | Wadden Sea teaching workshop |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
Results and Impact | The online workshop "Teaching the Wadden Sea Through Literature", convened by project PDRA Eveline de Smalen in July 2021, brought together conservation-oriented researchers, lecturers and conservationists from Germany and the Netherlands. A second workshop, also convened by de Smalen, took place in November 2021. The main aim of both workshops was to discuss the future possibility of using literature to engage with conservation issues in the Wadden Sea region, with undergraduate students being the main target audience in mind. A summer school is planned this year (2022) to take these ideas further. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
URL | https://conservationhumanities.com/2021/07/07/workshop-report-teaching-the-wadden-sea-through-litera... |
Description | Workshop in the Pyrenees 30 August to 5 September 2021 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | We organised a collaborative workshop within the Pyrenees National Park. This was a chance for Corridor Talk team members to communicate our research methods and early results to each other and a local key partner. This was organised as a series of field trips and knowledge exchange sessions taking place during the week of 30 August to 5 September 2021. The Pyrénées National Park provided two key members of staff to participate in the workshops. Etienne Farand works on the highly charged subject of human-carnivore relations within the park and is perfectly placed to share his knowledge and experience of working with local sheep farmers. He took us to visit a local area within the park where these issues are played out. Laurent Grandsimon is President of the National Park and a local mayor and spent an afternoon learning about our research methods and sharing his knowledge on key implementation and policy challenges that face national scale re-introduction programs, such as that for the brown bear. He was interested to learn of the possible benefits of a more transdisciplinary approach to research and conservation management and how this might even be fed into the French education system. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
URL | https://conservationhumanities.com/2021/09/14/team-workshop-in-the-pyrenees-national-park/ |