Anita Lateano

Personal statement:

I am a PhD researcher at the University of Westminster’s School of Architecture and Cities, using anthropological and multispecies approaches to explore coral reef conservation practices in Bunaken National Park, Indonesia. My work combines ethnographic and arts-based methodologies to examine how conservation is experienced and enacted across communities, governments, NGOs and the reef itself. With previous experience in international conservation NGOs, communications, and decolonisation research at the University of Birmingham, I bring an interdisciplinary perspective bridging social science, policy, and practice to advance socially and environmentally just approaches to conservation.

I am also a Knowledge Exchange and Impact Fellow on the ACCESS Environmental Social Science in Interdisciplinary Working project.

Key topic areas of research or interest:

My research explores coral reef conservation practices in Bunaken National Park, North Sulawesi, Indonesia, home to a number of coral restoration projects, and an area famed globally as a site of high coral reef biodiversity. Across Indonesia, coral reef conservation practices are organised by a diverse range of governmental, NGO, private and community-led organisations, but less than a fifth of them have any kind of post-installation monitoring framework (Razak et al. 2022). Through this research, this new industry will be approached anthropologically, to understand the impacts of coral reef conservation within local communities.