CCGC is a research group based in the Department of Geography at the University of Alabama
The University of Alabama is an institution founded on Choctaw and Creek land, as well as built and formerly maintained by the labor of enslaved black people. We acknowledge this past as part of our living present, as a way to engage with the many violences that often remain concealed in the places we work, live, and play.
Our collective is informed by scholarship from a wide array of allied fields spanning geography, politics, and the environmental humanities. We are principally organized around the framework of political ecology as a way to address important questions and problems in the fields of conservation, illegal wildlife trade, and natural resource management from a multi-species, more-than-human perspective.
With this in mind, we are a diverse group of scholars whose work is in conversation an array of environmentally-concerned disciplines. Our scholarship spans theoretical, empirical, and methodological foci, from the very applied to the theoretical.
Methodologically, we are a promiscuous group. We employ primarily (but not exclusively!) qualitative research methods ranging from ethnography and qualitative interviews and survey methods to visual methods such as photovoice and photo elicitation, all the way to methods in sonic geographies, soundscape recording, and more. We also collaborate with more quantitatively-trained researchers to develop innovative, mixed-methods approaches to research questions at a variety of scales from the local to global.
Empirically, the foci of CCGC to date cover species (re)introduction efforts, the political economy and politics of human-wildlife conflicts, illegal wildlife trade, contested river governance, more-than-human border studies, and experimental, multi-sensorial research methodologies.
Our collective is inspired to improve human-wildlife relations and inform more socially-just approaches to conserving life on Earth, inclusive of people, plants, and animals.
Our mission is to produce scholarship and engage in scholarly praxis to advance a vision for, and greater capacity to bring about, conservation justice.
