Sian Sullivan, Professor of Environment and Culture, has accepted an invitation to become a Research Associate for a Namibian research institute.

Currently celebrating its 60^th year, Gobabeb Namib Research Institute operates as a research, training and education centre for desert ecology and heritage research, attracting scientists and students visitors from all over the world. Sian has collaborated with the institute for many years. In 1995 she was the first research associate of the Desert Research Foundation of Namibia, then located at Gobabeb in the Namib desert, from whom she received a small grant to support research for her PhD on People, Plants and Practice in Drylands. More recently the Institute has been a partner on the AHRC-funded research project Future Pasts, led by Sian from BSU.

In the image above from Gobabeb’s website Sian is pictured with her long-term Namibian research partner, Welhemina Suro Ganuses. In recent years they have contributed a chapter for a national review of the circumstances of Indigenous and marginalised peoples in Namibia, their work being cited multiple times in a major Ancestral Land Commission report by the Namibian government. They are also collaborating on a series of films from their oral history and heritage mapping research in dryland north-west Namibia, the first of which is The Music Returns to Kai-as, viewable online here (and 30 min edit here).