We are pleased to announce two new research assistants have joined the Wildlife Trade Futures team as of January 2021.
Ekaterina Gladkova
Ekaterina Gladkova is a PhD researcher in Green Criminology at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne. Her doctoral project analyses how the process of pig farming intensification in Northern Ireland leads to environmental injustice. The study establishes how power relations that are driving the process of intensification affect the context of environmental decision-making and ultimately influence both the distribution of environmental harms from farming intensification and the realm of capabilities. Ekaterina’s research interests include crimes of the powerful, environmental (in)justice, and meat production and consumption. Her previous research concentrated on environmental and climate change governance in the Chilean Antarctic.
Within the Wildlife Trade Futures project, Ekaterina will be involved in identifying and documenting changes to laws and policies related to wildlife trade as a result of the COVID-19 crisis.
Maia Earnshaw
Maia Earnshaw is a Canadian graduate student at the University of San Francisco. Her research interests include the militarization of conservation, wildlife trafficking, and extractive development in endangered species habitats. She is currently focused on the Pangolin trade originating in Nigeria, specifically the difference between the Pangolin and other verminous disease carriers, such as the bat or rat. Rising concern about zoonotic infectious transmission, highlighted today in global responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, necessitates governmental action and changes in conservation policies. Earnshaw’s research is concerned with the ways the Pangolin, unlike other animals is cast as a victim, alongside “us.”
Within the Wildlife Trade Futures project, Maia will be conducting a systematic review of academic and grey literature to document wildlife trade policy and legislative changes being proposed by experts around the world in response to the COVID-19 crisis.
Together, Ekaterina and Maia will create a living, open-access database of proposed and already implemented changes to wildlife trade guidelines, policies and legislations globally during and in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Check back soon to view this database.
