Professor Veronica Strang FAcSS
Environmental Anthropologist
ABOUT
I started my career as a freelance writer exploring environmental issues, which took me from the UK, to the Caribbean and then to Canada and Australia. Writing for the Ministry of the Environment in Ontario led to involvement in the production of the 1987 Brundtland Report Our Common Future. This raised key questions for me about why some societies live more sustainably with the non-human world than others. Seeking answers to these questions, I signed up for a Master’s course in Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University. This provided such an illuminating way of thinking that I embarked upon a PhD and life as an academic.
For the last 30 years my research and consultancy work has been concerned with human-environmental relationships, in particular societies’ engagements with water. Every society has pressing water issues, so this has taken me all over the world, but my major ethnographic research has been in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. I now live in the UK, in Oxford, where I am affiliated to the University’s School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography.
I have worked with the water industry and multiple water using groups including indigenous communities, farmers, miners, urban and recreational water users, conservation organisations, museums and artists.
I regularly do consultancy work on indigenous land and water rights, most recently addressing sea country issues in the Tiwi Islands in northern Australia. My research also involves collaboration with the water sector and with international bodies such as UNESCO, the UN, the World Bank, and the International Water Association.
Interdisciplinarity
My research engages with a range of disciplinary areas and from 2012-2022 I was the Executive Director of Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study. From 2017-2022 I served on the UK’s national panel facilitating the evaluation of interdisciplinary research. I now have advisory roles assisting several Universities with their interdisciplinary activities.
Current projects
Having just completed a major study exploring different cultural and historical beliefs in water beings, and how these reflect changes in human-environmental relationships, I am working with a production company to develop a proposal for a related TV series, which will include animating some of the culturally diverse stories about water beings. See summary video below:
LATEST BOOK
2023. Water Beings: from nature worship to the environmental crisis, London: Reaktion Books. Water Beings | Reaktion Books
LYRIC FM INTERVIEW - WATER BEINGS
2024. Interview with Luke Clancy, Lyric FM. The Culture File Weekly: Water Beings, January 19th, 2024.
https://www.rte.ie/radio/podcasts/22344921-the-culture-file-weekly-200124-water-being-and-we/
BBC radio 4 INTERVIEW - WATER BEINGS
Interview with Laurie Taylor on Thinking Allowed. September 2023.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001qdyq
podcastS
2023. ‘Water Beings, Human-Nature Relations and the Environmental Crisis’. Interview with Sidsel Marie Henriksen, Anthropology on Air.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5b9gOxuEb8J0YTcDFQ8WNl?si=62b879a432064844 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/dk/podcast/anthropology-on-air/id1676462743?i=1000616792814
Contact
telephone
+44 (0)7751 756261
Other websites
University of Oxford, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography
UPCOMING LECTURES
2024. Water Beings as Agents of Change in Human-Environmental Relations, online event, Wisdoms of Water: an exploration in memory, mythology and freedom, June 4th 2024.
2024. The Dorset Otter-Dragon: water beings, art and agency in the Stour River Valley, International conference, Sacred Waters an: an international and transdisciplinary conference, Buxton, UK. June 30th -July 3rd.
2024. Serpent Tales: water beings and transformational narratives in contemporary environmental activism.19th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research, University of Latvia, June 17th-24th, .
2024. Degrees of Difference: interdisciplinary flows in human-water relations. Lectio Magistralis, Guest lecture for graduation ceremony, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. May 23rd.
2024. A City Built With Water: elemental co-creativity in the Venetian lagoon. Keynote lecture, Conference, Inland waterscapes, Udine University. May 22nd-25th.
2024. Water Beings: aquatic deities in diverse cultural and historical contexts, University of South Florida, Tampa, April 1st.
2024. Personifying the River: the creative agency of water beings, International symposium, Riverine: a multi-species approach to decolonising landscapes, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, March 25th-30th.
2024. Divine Alternatives: water beings and their transformational potential in human-non-human relations, International Conference, Being with Water Otherwise, University of Cambridge, April 15th-16th.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
2023. ‘The Monstrous Sea’, in Lagoonscapes: Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities, 3(2), pp. 257-284.
2023. ‘Making Waves: the role of indigenous water beings in debates about human and non-human rights’,S. Babidge, U. Eickelkamp, L. Connor (eds). Special Issue, Oceania.93(3), pp. 216-240.
Strang. V. 2023. ‘Living Kindness: re-imagining kinship for a more humane future’, H. Donner and V. Goddard, (eds). Special Issue,’ Kinship and the Politics of Responsibility’, Critique of Anthropology. 43(4) pp. 476-494.