Fellow: Marie Ladekjær Gravesen
Supervision: Professor Dr. Michael Bollig
Host Institution: Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Cologne
Duration: 3 years – starting from 1 October 2013
Project: ‘Negotiating Access to Land in a Contested Environment: Actors, Policies, Visions and the Fragmentation of Land-Use in Western Laikipia‘
This project focuses on past and present negotiations of land access in the former White Highlands of Western Laikipia. The project zooms in on a smaller spatial unit of analysis close to Rumuruti town and explores how the different actors relate to each other both internally within groups, to the landscape and to other present/past actors in the landscape.
By combining oral histories with archival data on the Million Acre Scheme the study explores different narratives, discourses and understandings of land rights and negotiations of access. The study provides new information on how social fragmentation and hybrid social-ecological activities relates to resilience towards physical, social and political change.
The study will combine anthropological and historical approaches when contextualizing the changes in the area since the Million Acre Scheme was set up in the early 1960s.