My PhD research is an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods study examining how environmental perspectives are translated between the worlds of Indigenous peoples and the world of international politics. It aims to implement innovative digital methods of data production, analysis, and visualisation to contribute to the decolonisation of environmental governance narratives and aspire to more just and effective practices.
International environmental discourse will be digitally analysed through data collected and compiled from the Conferences of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC-COP) and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD-COP). Meanwhile, participatory digital storytelling with members of an Amazonian Cocama community will co-produce audio and visual data capturing their perspectives on and concerns for the territory they inhabit. Analysis of these data will explore traditional concepts for which translation into European languages is problematic and the vernacularisation of scientific concepts.
Sarah Capes
I hold a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and Latin American Studies and a master’s in Philosophy. In both instances, I focused particularly on issues of social injustice, my MA culminating in a dissertation on universal moral duties in the context of international structural injustice. I have a PGCE in modern foreign languages, and my cosmopolitanist teaching style is consciously grounded in the real world. I have assisted Leverhulme-funded research on Indigenous peoples’ food security in the international environmental regime, and I have managed a research expedition in the Peruvian Amazon collecting biodiversity, climate change and community conservation data.