Liana Chua | Human-Orangutan Relations

Liana Chua is Reader in Anthropology at Brunel University London. She has worked with rural Bidayuh communities in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, since 2003, looking at conversion to Christianity, ethnic and religious politics, development, displacement and experiences of environmental change. Her current research revolves around the social dimensions of the global network of orangutan conservation, which she is exploring with her colleagues through two projects: POKOK (Arcus Foundation/Brunel University) and The Global Lives of the Orangutan (GLO; European Research Council Starting Grant).

She is especially interested in how ideas, images, people and resources travel between different nodes of conservation, and how these movements can shape different realities on the ground. This video presents research and analysis that’s been carried out by both the POKOK and GLO teams, the other members of which are Hannah Fair, Viola Schreer, Anna Stępień and Paul Hasan Thung.

Further reading

Chua, L, Harrison, ME, Fair, H, et al. 2020. ‘Conservation and the social sciences: Beyond critique and co-optation. A case study from orangutan conservation’. People and Nature 2:42-60.

Chua, L. 2018. ‘Iceland advert: conservation is intensely political, let’s not pretend otherwise’. The Conversation, 14 November 2018. 

Rubis, J.M. 2020. ‘The orang utan is not an indigenous name: knowing and naming the maias as a decolonizing epistemology’. Cultural Studies 34:5, 811-830. DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2020.1780281.

Yuliani, E., Adnan, H., Achdiawan, et al. 2018. ‘The roles of traditional knowledge systems in orang-utan Pongo spp. and forest conservation: A case study of Danau Sentarum, West Kalimantan, Indonesia’. Oryx, 52(1): 156-165. DOI:10.1017/S0030605316000636.