Lei Chang

This research investigates how conservation practices influence human-wildlife relationships. Xishuangbanna is home to China’s last tropical rainforest and endangered wild Asian elephants. Under recent biodiversity conservation initiatives, the elephant population has grown, but their habitats cannot provide sufficient food resources, pushing elephants to frequently raid nearby crops. Local farmers face threats from elephant incursions and are constrained by animal protection laws, so they can only rely on elephant monitoring systems to avoid encounters. To understand the juxtaposition of human-elephant conflict and coexistence under the conservation context, this research will address three questions: (1) How do historical and contemporary conservation policies regulate local communities’ access to land and influence their attitudes toward elephants? (2) How do monitoring and warning infrastructures shape the rhythms of rural lives and affect human-elephant interactions? (3) How do farmers and elephants navigate the conservation landscape and develop everyday strategies to compete and co-inhabit? I will conduct 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork through policy archival research, participant observation of local agricultural activities, and interviews with relevant stakeholders. By approaching conservation as a lived and relational process, this project will examine interwoven more-than-human assemblages to reveal how state-led conservation practices mediate wildlife protection and rural livelihoods.