Professor Veronica Strang FAcSS
Environmental Anthropologist
ABOUT
I started my career as a freelance writer exploring environmental issues, which took me from the UK, to the Caribbean and then to Canada and Australia. Writing for the Ministry of the Environment in Ontario led to involvement in the production of the 1987 Brundtland Report Our Common Future. This raised key questions for me about why some societies live more sustainably with the non-human world than others. Seeking answers to these questions, I signed up for a Master’s course in Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University. This provided such an illuminating way of thinking that I embarked upon a PhD and life as an academic.
For the last 30 years my research and consultancy work has been concerned with human-environmental relationships, in particular societies’ engagements with water. Every society has pressing water issues, so this has taken me all over the world, but my major ethnographic research has been in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. I now live in the UK, in Oxford, where I am affiliated to the University’s School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography.
I have worked with the water industry and multiple water using groups including indigenous communities, farmers, miners, urban and recreational water users, conservation organisations, museums and artists.
I regularly do consultancy work on indigenous land and water rights, most recently addressing sea country issues in the Tiwi Islands in northern Australia. My research also involves collaboration with the water sector and with international bodies such as UNESCO, the UN, the World Bank, and the International Water Association.
Interdisciplinarity
My research engages with a range of disciplinary areas and from 2012-2022 I was the Executive Director of Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study. From 2017-2022 I served on the UK’s national panel facilitating the evaluation of interdisciplinary research. I now assist several Universities with their interdisciplinary activities.
Current projects
Having just completed a major study exploring different cultural and historical beliefs in water beings, and how these reflect changes in human-environmental relationships, I am working with a production company to develop a proposal for a related TV series, which will include animating some of the culturally diverse stories about water beings. See summary video below.
I am also collaborating with fellow environmental anthropologist Franz Krause on an edited book, Traversing Scales in Material Relations with Water, to be published by Berghahn in 2025.
Other ongoing advisory and collaborative endeavours include a project with colleagues in Italy on the Venice lagoon, and another on eels in the Po Delta; an Oslo-Venice collaboration on deltas; some work on river governance with colleagues in Cambridge, and a collaborative role in artist Siobhan McDonald’s Dublin Port project.
LATEST BOOK
2023. Water Beings: from nature worship to the environmental crisis, London: Reaktion Books. Water Beings | Reaktion Books
LYRIC FM INTERVIEW - WATER BEINGS
2024. Interview with Luke Clancy, Lyric FM. The Culture File Weekly: Water Beings, January 19th, 2024.
https://www.rte.ie/radio/podcasts/22344921-the-culture-file-weekly-200124-water-being-and-we/
BBC radio 4 INTERVIEW - WATER BEINGS
Interview with Laurie Taylor on Thinking Allowed. September 2023.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001qdyq
podcastS
2024. Interview with Jana Byars, New Books Network podcast, December 16th, 2024.
2023. ‘Water Beings, Human-Nature Relations and the Environmental Crisis’. Interview with Sidsel Marie Henriksen, Anthropology on Air.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5b9gOxuEb8J0YTcDFQ8WNl?si=62b879a432064844 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/dk/podcast/anthropology-on-air/id1676462743?i=1000616792814
Contact
telephone
07751 756261 (International code +44 )
Other websites
University of Oxford, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography
recent and upcoming LECTURES
Littoral Beings: totemic sea country in Aboriginal Australia, (working title). online lecture for Vanderbilt University, February 10th, 2025.
Rising Tides: water beings as agents of change in environmental activism, online talk for The Folklore Society, Dec. 10th, 2024.
Deep Histories: the groundwaters of serpentine treasure guardians, Oxford Treasure Seminars, Oxford University, November 6th 2024.
Sacred Water: rights and reverence, Public debate, Into the Wild Festival, Chidingley Estate, Sussex, August 25th, 2024.
The Dorset Otter-Dragon: water beings, art and agency in the Stour River Valley, International conference, Sacred Waters an: an international and transdisciplinary conference, Buxton, UK. June 30th -July 3rd. 2024.
Serpent Tales: water beings and transformational narratives in contemporary environmental activism.19th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research, University of Latvia, June 17th-24th, 2024.
Degrees of Difference: interdisciplinary flows in human-water relations. Lectio Magistralis, Guest lecture for graduation ceremony, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. May 23rd, 2024
A City Built With Water: elemental co-creativity in the Venetian lagoon. Keynote lecture, Conference, Inland waterscapes, Udine University. May 22nd-25th, 2024.
Water Beings: aquatic deities in diverse cultural and historical contexts, University of South Florida, Tampa, April 1st, 2024.
Personifying the River: the creative agency of water beings, International symposium, Riverine: a multi-species approach to decolonising landscapes, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, March 25th-30th, 2024.
RECENT AND UPCOMING PUBLICATIONS
2025. forthcoming. Title tbc. Article for Hellebore Magazine.
2025. in press. ‘Epilogue’, in Aquacritical Perspectives on Rivers and their Waterscapes: intersections of history and literature, eds. Anna Barcz and Paolo Gruppuso, Special issue, Environmental Humanities.
2023. ‘The Monstrous Sea’, in Lagoonscapes: Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities, 3(2), pp. 257-284.
2023. ‘Making Waves: the role of indigenous water beings in debates about human and non-human rights’,S. Babidge, U. Eickelkamp, L. Connor (eds). Special Issue, Oceania.93(3), pp. 216-240.