Centre For Ethnoecology
The Centre for Ethnoecology brings together people, knowledge and practice to explore the relationships between human cultures and the living world. We study the relationships through which people and places come to know and constitute one another.
We are interested in how people understand, inhabit, care for and make meaning from the places they live. Our work sits at the meeting point of ecology, anthropology, environmental humanities, traditional ecological knowledge, local knowledge, cultural practice and nature recovery.
We believe that creating more regenerative futures is not simply a technical or environmental challenge. It is also a question of culture, identity, knowledge and relationship.
Our work explores how different ways of knowing and relating to place can help us imagine and create more sustainable futures — from the practical knowledge held within landscapes and communities, to the stories, skills, languages, traditions and values through which people understand their relationship with their local ecology.
We work through research, collaboration, consultancy, teaching, events and practical engagement, connecting academic thinking with lived experience and varied place-based practice.
Our aim is to work with researchers, practitioners, and communities to explore, investigate, and share diverse approaches that work towards an ecologically regenerative future.
To inhabit the world is to join with it in the processes by which it continually comes into being.
- Dr Tim Ingold, Anthropologist
Articles
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Ecologies of Practice
Rather than traditional projects, with a linear beginning, middle and end, our approach instead centres around the many varied relatiosnhips, practices and approaches to exploring how communities continually develop in how they live with the Land. Our aim is to explore multiple ways of knowing and relating to the land, sometimes in friction with one another, but always providing insights into varied insights and innovative ideas.
Multispecies
Recognising how communities, both human and non-human, co-exist within one another’s lives.
Traditional Ecological Knowledge
Investigating how intergenerational knowledge, skills and crafts influence ecological identities.
Watershed
Collaborating with artists, practitioners and researchers within the River Trent landscape.
Permaculture
Exploring how regenerative agricultural practice relates to ecological identity.
What if the skills, stories and relationships that connect us to place could help shape more regenerative futures?
Kincraft brings together makers, practitioners, researchers, artists, farmers, ecologists, storytellers and local people to explore how we understand, inhabit and care for the places we call home.
Through traditional ecological skills, crafts, local knowledge, food, stories and hands-on making, the festival turns relationship with place into something we can experience, share and create together.
This isn't about recreating the past. It is about learning from the ways people have lived with landscapes and asking what our relationships might become in the future.
Kincraft is a space for learning, making, questioning and imagining: a meeting point between cultural knowledge, ecological understanding and the possibilities of a more regenerative future.
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Partner With Us
We work with universities, businesses, charities and public bodies to explore the cultural and ecological dimensions of sustainability.
By connecting research, local knowledge and practical experience, we help partners develop place-based approaches, generate new insights and create meaningful environmental change through collaboration.
From knowledge to relationship
The Centre for Ethnoecology exists to explore these questions.
We believe the future of sustainability depends not only on what we know about the natural world, but on how we understand our place within it.
Through research, practice, partnership and gathering, we create spaces for different forms of knowledge to meet.
Because ecological futures are ultimately human futures too.
And the places we live are not simply landscapes around us.
They are places we belong to, depend upon, shape — and are shaped by.
We study the diversity and development of perspectives and relationships between communities and their local ecologies.
We invest for regenerative futures.
The Centre for Ethnoecology is a Community Interest Company (registration number 12365677).