Emilie Guitard

As a Doctor in Anthropology (Paris Nanterre University, France), I study the relationships to nature in several cities in Sub-Saharan Africa. My PhD research was conducted between 2007 and 2011 with public authorities and city-dwellers of two North Cameroonian, middle-size cities (Garoua and Maroua); it focused on the perceptions and the institutional and popular practices of waste management, linked to power relations. In keeping with this first research work, I am currently studying interactions between municipal policies and city-dwellers’ representations and practices of waste and natural spaces management, within cities in Central Africa (Cameroon), Southern Africa (Zimbabwe, as part of the Interdisciplinary Program on Indigenous Indicators of Fauna and Flora), and West Africa (Nigeria). Together with my research activities, I have started to teach since 2007 till 2013 at the Department of Anthropology of Nanterre University, then from 2015 to 2019 at IFRA Nigeria to Nigerian and African post-graduate students, and since 2019 to French master students at the Institut of Geography, Paris, on topics ranging from the basics of Anthropology (classical texts and fieldwork methodology), to seminars on political anthropology of Africa, material culture studies, the relations of human societies to their natural environments and the urbanisation dynamics in the Global South.