Seminar by Liana Chua, Thursday 28.5.

The Department of Ecological Anthropology invites you to the upcoming seminar talk ‘What Care Takes: Affective politics and more-than-human contestations in a conservation frontier‘ by Liana Chua, a social anthropologist from the University of Cambridge.

The lecture will take place on Thursday, 28.5.2026 at 14:00 (CET) in the seminar room of the Institute of Ethnology CAS, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1. To attend in person or online, please register.

Abstract: Conservation has increasingly been framed as a ‘salvage’ frontier that drastically remakes territories, livelihoods, and socio-legal systems. Our paper nuances this depiction by highlighting the affective, moral, and relational dimensions of frontier-making in orangutan conservation, which we conceptualise as a frontier of care: a powerful interventionist project that transforms territories, livelihoods, local carescapes, atmospheres, and quotidian relations in the name of caring for one critically endangered species. By asking what care takes, we reveal the coercive, dispossessive effects, but also fragilities, of projects of care-for-orangutans, and ask what other possibilities of care might emerge in frontier zones.    

Bio: Liana Chua is a social anthropologist based at the University of Cambridge. She has long-term research in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, where she has explored Christian conversion, ethnic politics, development and resettlement among Bidayuh communities. Her recent research examines the politics, socialities and aesthetics of orangutan conservation in the Anthropocene.

PDF here

PDF of the Seminar Series here