Megan Tarrant
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity
Rights of nature in the Anthropocene
Biography
I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate working across LCAB and Stockholm Environment Institute - York (SEI-Y). My research combines environmental social science, participatory methods, political ecology and environmental justice. I undertook my PhD at LCAB, which focused on rights-based approaches to conservation. Previously, I’ve worked for conservation and international development NGOs and was a Research Assistant at the UCL Extreme Citizen Science (UCL ExCiteS) research group supporting researchers and communities to develop citizen science projects, regardless of their background or literacy level. I have a BA in Archaeology and Anthropology and a MSc in Anthropology, Environment and Development, both from UCL.
Research
My research responds to the increasing global movement for rights of nature, and the ways in which biocultural relationships are understood in rights of nature frameworks. I work across LCAB, SEI, Environment, Politics and Law, seeking to understand how rights of nature frameworks can be successfully implemented with respect to local people’s relationships with their environment and biodiversity and the values they hold. Taking rivers in England as my focus, I explore how communities’ relationships with the rivers they live alongside can be translated into legal frameworks and what these could mean for the practical treatment and protection of biodiversity, as well as how this might vary across cultural and ecological contexts and scales. I bring insights from my previous work in conservation social science to explore the justice dimensions of who speaks for nature and the political implications of nature’s rights.