Following Primates: Approaching Conflict in Contested Regions

Paper Title

Following Primates: Approaching Conflict in Contested Regions

Publication Info

• Topic area: Conflict navigation in community-based environmental research.
• Keywords: HCI, environmental research, contested commons, conflict navigation, adversarial design, collaborative mapping, socio-ecological systems, post-colonial governance, digital practices, community engagement.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Environmental research in contested, community-managed commons often generates conflicts due to intersecting socio-political, historical, and ecological factors. Existing design approaches focus on resolving conflicts rather than engaging with them as productive sites of inquiry.
• Significance: Understanding and addressing these conflicts is critical for equitable and sustainable community-based environmental governance, particularly in post-colonial contexts where power imbalances persist.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work in HCI and participatory design has explored conflict as a generative force but has not sufficiently addressed its role in rural, majority-world settings with complex socio-ecological dynamics. This paper builds on adversarial and agonistic design methods to explore how conflicts can be surfaced and navigated in such settings.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The authors propose "staying with conflict" as a design orientation, using ethnography and collaborative mapping to surface and engage with conflicts in contested environmental research settings.
• Novelty:
  1. Demonstrates how digital practices in environmental research can become sites of conflict in community-governed commons.
  2. Introduces "staying with conflict" as a practical orientation for design research, emphasizing engagement over resolution.
  3. Provides four strategies for designing spaces to engage with conflict: creating contestational objects, designing for pauses and between-ness, supporting narrative dimensions of data, and reflecting on subjectivities.
  4. Extends HCI work on data justice by showing how digital practices can marginalize local knowledge and exacerbate tensions.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  1. Conducted eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mandal Valley, India, including interviews, observations, and group discussions.
  2. Facilitated a one-day mapping workshop with members of the Himalayan Research Project (HRP) to co-create maps and reflect on conflicts.
  3. Used reflexive thematic analysis and the Ecologies of Contestation Framework to analyze data and structure findings.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Conflicts in Mandal Valley are deeply entangled with historical land rights, economic pressures, and socio-cultural hierarchies.
  • Digital practices, such as GPS tracking and data collection, assert a worldview that overlooks local expertise and more-than-human realities, fueling tensions.
  • Collaborative mapping surfaced latent conflicts and enabled participants to reflect on their positionalities and ethical contradictions.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Unlike consensus-driven approaches, this method embraces conflict as a site for deeper socio-political understanding and collaboration.
  • The mapping workshop revealed entangled conflicts and fostered reflexivity among participants, leading to new strategies for community engagement.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • The study involved ethnographic observations and a mapping workshop with 10 HRP members, focusing on conflicts related to environmental research and community interactions.
  • Data included field notes, interviews, and co-created maps, analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis.
• Limitations and future work:
  • The workshop involved only HRP members, not the broader community, limiting the perspective on conflicts.
  • The study represents a single workshop and cannot claim durable change; longitudinal research is needed.
  • Findings are specific to Mandal Valley and require adaptation for other contested settings.

Summary

This paper explores how conflicts in community-based environmental research can be surfaced and navigated through ethnography and collaborative mapping. Focusing on Mandal Valley, India, the study reveals how digital practices and historical governance structures contribute to tensions between researchers and local communities. The authors propose "staying with conflict" as a design orientation, offering strategies to engage with tensions productively. By treating conflict as a site of inquiry, the approach fosters deeper socio-political understanding and collaborative possibilities, with implications for HCI, participatory design, and environmental governance.