Emilie is a doctoral researcher in the ERC Advanced Grant Project “Rewilding the Anthropocene”. In her PhD she will focus on elephant management, and investigate how the use of modern technologies reshapes transboundary elephant conservation in the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area. Besides human-environment relations and multispecies studies, she is interested in feminist STS and intersectionality studies.

Emilie completed her master’s degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth. In her thesis, she deepened her interest in human-environmental relations and used a multispecies approach to examine notions of wildness in the rewilding project “European Bison in the Rothaar Mountains”. In addition to her studies, she completed the certificate program “Intersectionality Studies and Diversity Competencies” and gained practical skills while working as a student assistant at the Iwalewahaus, the Museum of Contemporary African Art and Culture at the University of Bayreuth, the Department of Anthropology of Africa, the Equal Opportunities Department at the University of Bayreuth, as well as the Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle.

Multisensory Conservation: On the Role of Technologies in Transboundary Elephant Management

About half of Africa’s remaining savanna elephants live in the world’s largest transfrontier conservation area, the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA TFCA), whereby the density varies greatly from state to state. Elephants are known to be a highly mobile species, frequently moving beyond protected areas and across national borders. While human populations and their settlements are concurrently increasing, human-elephant conflict (HEC) remains a severe problem in anthropogenic landscapes where the loss and fragmentation of habitat pushes elephants and humans closer together and exacerbates conflicts over natural resources. In order to manage growing wildlife populations and their movement across five countries, KAZA’s member states aim to coordinate conservation practices and to share their knowledge. Nowadays, modern technologies such as satellite collars, camera traps, drones as well as light aircraft in aerial surveys are crucial to gain data about elephant movements, distributions, population sizes and demographics. The member states, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and individual researchers use the acquired data for the allocation of hunting quotas, the proposal of wildlife corridors, the definition of preferred habitat types and to reduce causes of human-elephant conflict. Accordingly, the application of technologies shapes conservation practices, knowledge and landscapes.

My PhD project will investigate this interplay of elephants, humans, technologies and landscapes. On the example of elephant management in Botswana and Namibia, it will look at the ways how modern technology was applied, and impacted conservation practices and knowledge since its introduction up to the present. It will address complex power dynamics that evolve with the creation of ‘facts’ through (digital) technologies, but also focus on other ways of knowing and living with elephants. Lastly, the reciprocal becoming of technologies and elephants’ ways of life will be examined.