The global lives of the orangutan

“Refiguring conservation in/for “the Anthropocene”: the global lives of the orangutan’ (GLO) is a five-year research project (Jan 2018-Dec 2022) funded by the European Research Council (Starting Grant #758494). It is led by Dr Liana Chua (Principal Investigator), Reader in Anthropology at Brunel University London, who works together with postdocs Dr Viola Schreer and Hannah Fair, and PhD student Anna Stępień.GLO puts socio-cultural anthropology to work in increasingly interdisciplinary conversations about multispecies entanglements and ‘the Anthropocene’. It draws on two distinctive anthropological strengths – in-depth ethnography and multiply-scaled comparison – to flesh out the big, sometimes abstract, questions raised by global conservation debates and policies.  Using multi-sited ethnography, it explores how contemporary orangutan conservation is responding to the challenges posed by what is widely known as ‘the Anthropocene’ – a term that encapsulates the overwhelming, transformative impact of human activity on the planet.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 758494.