@Nature, #Gorilla_2.0: Co-Producing and Co-Consuming Physical and Virtual Conservation Landscapes from Facebook to Cameroon to Hawai`i, USA

Research in Progress Seminar

Ingrid L. Nelson 

(Postdoctoral Researcher in Agrarian and Environmental Change, ISS)

@Nature, #Gorilla_2.0: Co-Producing and Co-Consuming Physical and Virtual Conservation Landscapes

from Facebook to Cameroon to Hawai`i, USA

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Ingrid L. Nelson

Abstract:  Postdoctoral Researcher Ingrid L. Nelson revisits two key figures analysed in Donna Haraway's monograph titled Primate Visions: Gender Race and Nature in The World of Modern Science (1989). These figures are Koko, a female lowland gorilla born in the San Francisco Zoo and her companion Dr. Francine (Penny) Patterson, a developmental psychologist who taught Koko how to communicate with American Sign Language (ASL) during her graduate studies. Many years after Haraway's analysis, Koko and Penny became one of the earliest examples of conservation-related Web 2.0 engagement with their unprecedented inter-species America Online (AOL) chat room encounter with 7,811 AOL members in 1998. Today Koko (The Gorilla Foundation) has a twitter account (@kokotweets), a Facebook page, a YouTube channel and a website where users watch videos of Koko celebrating birthdays, sign up for a Capital One Koko credit card, purchase signed reprints of Koko’s paintings, or donate to two ‘distant’ conservation projects. The first project site is a gorilla reserve in Cameroon and the second is a former pineapple plantation in Maui, Hawai`i that will eventually serve as a sanctuary that mimics 'central African' environments and that caters to lowland gorillas born in American zoos. This Research in Progress Seminar draws on preliminary analysis and a feminist political ecology framework to examine how Web 2.0 technologies, both constrain and broaden the range of possible practices of conservation in these and other contexts. Nelson engages with Dr. Bram Büscher's (ISS) work, which identifies online and conservation environments that connect through Web 2.0 and social media and produce various natures referred to as Nature 2.0. Nelson draws particular attention to how race, gender, sexuality, emotion and other factors inform Nature 2.0 theories and practices.