The Field Diary is a digital open-access newsletter that highlights and promotes the human perspective of conducting fieldwork anywhere in the world by all groups working for companies, government, development/conservation/missionary NGOs, security, graduate students, and academia. The first issue of the Field Diary brought together a collection of fieldwork-themed stories from many parts of the world including, Kenya, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, and New […]
Beny Lilawola joins ARCC
ARCC project members have expanded to include Beny Lilawola, an MA student in the Department of History at the University of Dar es Salaam. Lilawola is supervised by former REAL project ESR Dr Maxmillian Chuhila. Lilawola has long been interested in how cash crop production in the colonial period transformed agricultural livelihoods and landscapes throughout Tanzania. […]
Participatory mapping of bio-cultural heritage hotspots in western Serengeti
Dr Anna Shoemaker, ARCC post-doc has just spent the last month touring around western Serengeti visiting heritage sites in collaboration with local partners in an effort to document and understand the historical ecology of this incredibly varied landscape. The range of sites encountered was vast and included German colonial communication posts, hand-dug 19th/20th century wells, […]
Vegetation surveys in Serengeti
The ARCC project has been ramping it’s archaeological activity in western Serengeti this past month, doing participatory mapping and surveys throughout the region. The ARCC project’s archaeologist post-doc Anna Shoemaker was thrilled to be joined in the field from November 6-11 by Professor Tamera Minnick and Richard Alward, both of whom are currently visiting scholars at […]
ARCC Imagines Serengeti with Jan Bender Shetler
ARCC project member Anna Shoemaker recently joined Jan Bender Shetler and Jonathon Schramm on an excursion around western Serengeti. Shetler is a professor of history at Goshen College who has enjoyed a long career researching oral traditions, social identity, landscape and gendered memory and environmental history in the Mara region. Jonathon Schramm is an associate professor of […]
ARCC hosts scenario development workshop in Mugumu
Between August 5 – August 7, 2019, the ARCC project hosted a scenario analysis workshop in the town of Mugumu. This workshop brought together NGO workers, conservationists, government officials, researchers and private sector representatives in order to develop possible scenarios for future land use change in the western Serengeti region. The western Serengeti region is […]
Participatory Scenario Planning Workshop in Ifakara
The Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) is a 20 year agricultural commercialisation initiative launched by the World Economic Forum in 2010, with the ultimate goal of enhancing agricultural productivity, food security, poverty reduction and environmental sustainability. The corridor runs through Tanzania’s Kilombero district, an incredibly fertile and biodiverse area with a future that […]
ARCC First Fieldwork in Tanzania
Rob Marchant, Colin Courtney-Mustaphi and Rebecca Kariuki set out for the first ARCC project fieldwork in northern Tanzania in early July 2018. The fieldwork largely involved collecting lake sediment cores from Speke’s Bay in Lake Victoria. It also involved capturing leaf area index (LAI) images and surveying land use and livelihood patterns across northern Tanzania. […]
Field Diary Issue 2
The Challenges Undisclosed reflecting on the invisible experiences of doctoral fieldwork This special issue of Field Diary, guest edited by Liz Storer and Anna Shoemaker, is the second online publication in the Field Diary series produced by the REAL project. The mere invocation of ‘the field’ conjures up representations of adventure, understanding, challenges, deep connection and loneliness. […]
REAL Visits Mount Suswa Conservancy
March 31st is one of my most favourite field visits. It was most honourable to have almost the entire REAL group visit one of my field sites – Mount Suswa, after a conservation training in Nairobi. Not only was visiting Suswa a break from the city, it was an opportunity to visit a conservancy, one conservation […]
Field Diary Call for Contributions
The first issue of the Field Diary brought together a collection of fieldwork-themed stories from many parts of the world including, Kenya, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, and New Zealand. It is available here: http://www.real-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Field-Diary-issue-1.pdf The Field Diary is a digital open-access newsletter that highlights and promotes the human perspective of conducting fieldwork anywhere in the world by all groups working for companies, government, development/conservation/missionary […]
Quadcopter Ndege footage from Kenya and Tanzania
Ndege means ‘bird’ in Kiswahili. Here we expose some footage from Kenya and Tanzania where REAL members from the University of York have been doing fieldwork in 2014 and 2015. This video was edited by Quinn Asena.