An Archival History of Jordan's Nature Reserves: Conservation, Racial Science and National Identity

In this talk, Dr Olivia Mason will trace the history of Jordan's nature reserves in the British archives, exploring how nature reserves bring global and situated resource narratives into conversation, how they continue imperial spatial imaginations after periods of administrative colonialism, and the connections between conservation agendas and imperial geopolitical alliances.

The 1960s saw plans put in place for a series of national parks that would protect Jordan’s natural resources and address concerns around resource scarcity and exploitation. These plans were supported by a series of British led expeditions to Jordan in the 1960s that brought together academics, environmental scientists, and ornithologists.

This talk by Dr Olivia Mason will trace these expeditions through the archives and how they entangled conservation in Jordan with nationalist narratives, racial science, and colonial conservation imaginations.

The 1960s in Jordan was a period of changing (post)colonial nationalist politics following its independence from the British mandate period in 1946. It was also a period of growing concerns about resource scarcity in the Middle East and a new (post)colonial world order that saw the emergence of global environmental organisations.

By tracing the history of Jordan’s nature reserves in British archives, Mason will explore how nature reserves bring global and situated resource narratives into conversation, how they continue imperial spatial imaginations after periods of administrative colonialism, and the connections between conservation agendas and imperial geopolitical alliances.

Meet the speakers

Olivia Mason is a Lecturer in the school of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University. Her work sits across cultural, environmental, and political geography, and is broadly centred on mobility politics and resource colonialism, and to date has mostly been focused on Jordan. Her research projects have included explorations of long-distance walking trails in the Middle East and their associated im/mobilities, territorial politics, and (post)colonial geographies of nationalism. She is currently PI of a research project entitled 'Cultural politics of nature reserves: resource tensions, (post)colonial state making, and Bedouin in Jordan' that explores relationships between Bedouin, environmental changes, and nature conservation.

Frederick Wojnarowski is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, LSE. Fred is interested in the political and economic anthropology and history of the Middle East, especially Jordan, as well as broader questions of social change and socio-political categorisation. His research at the LSE examines the intersection of discourses of water scarcity, environmental justice and corruption in rural Jordan. It traces the everyday hydropolitics of distributing, stealing and contesting water in a setting widely recognised as one of the most water-poor in the world, exploring the social life of water, its infrastructure, and its contested flows, as they variously reproduce, reveal and erode relations between different types of imagined community at different scales.

This event will be chaired by Michael Mason, LSE Middle East Centre.

Michael Mason is Director of the LSE Middle East Centre and Professor of Environmental Geography in the Department of Geography and Environment, LSE and an Associate of the Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change and the Environment. He is interested in ecological politics and governance as applied to questions of accountability, security and sovereignty. This research addresses both global environmental politics and regional environmental change in Western Asia/the Middle East.

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