Geographies of Resilience: Community-Driven Archiving for the Preservation of Penan Cultural Heritage

Students, faculty and staff are invited to attend the second Nicholas Institute and UPEP Environmental Institutions Seminar Series presentation of the spring 2025 semester. Our speaker will be Dr. Shorna Allred, Susan R. Wolf Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an adjunct professor at Cornell University in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment and the Department of Global Development. No registration required.

Cultural resilience centers the threatened, intangible aspects of culture, including language, beliefs, and knowledge, and considers how cultural background (i.e., culture, cultural values, language, customs, norms) helps individuals and communities overcome adversity. In this talk, Allred will discuss her collaborative research with frontline Indigenous and tribal communities in the context of environmental and cultural justice. Her community-based research links university and community and is founded on the principles of reciprocity and mutuality. This talk will focus on geographies of resilience through the lived experience of the Penan Indigenous community in Long Lamai, Sarawak, Borneo. The Penan, formerly nomadic hunter-gatherers, live in the interior of Borneo's biologically diverse equatorial rainforests. The Penan are actively working to conserve their culture and ties to the rainforest in the face of climate change, global development, and the transition from nomadic to settled life.

Part of the UPEP Environmental Institutions Seminar Series, organized by the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability and the University Program in Environmental Policy (UPEP), a doctoral degree program jointly offered by the Nicholas School of the Environment and Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.