Much has been written and debated about conservation—whether of nature, buildings, culture, language, biological material, or objects. Conservation debates have long been tied to ideologies and narratives that mandate the need to conserve and preserve. Historically, these narratives have often emerged from positions of power, including colonial occupation, authoritarian regimes, elite actors, or politically motivated agendas (Neumann 2001).
More recently, questions of what is conserved, by whom, for whom, and how have gained renewed prominence. As climate concerns become increasingly urgent, and as remote geographies and cultural artefacts become sites of struggle over alternative futures, conservation has emerged as a contested and politicized field. In the present, conservation rationales often remain rooted in colonial processes of extraction and displacement, or they follow the logics of capital circulation. Conservation may also be mobilized through ideas of identity and belonging, forming part of nation-building practices, processes of historical erasure, or regimes of selective memorialization (Hall 2023; Oswalt 2023).
Recent calls to reconsider conservation have emerged in response to colonial looting, exposing the museum as a site of “imperialist plunder” and underscoring the urgency of restitution (Hertzog and Uzebu-Imarhiagbe 2022; Jacobs 2024, 179; Rassool and Gibbon 2024). In the realm of nature conservation, climate and resource crises have produced a vast economy of land grabs under the guise of moral imperatives to conserve (Mbaria and Ogada 2016; Sène 2024). In urban and cultural contexts, self-initiated, community-led restoration and conservation movements have foregrounded conservation as an urgent practice of “everyday survivance”—understood as both survival and resistance (Laxness 2025; Nyagwalla et al. 2023).
This series of public talks and debates explores conservation as a process, an ideology, and a field of practice shaped by—and shaping—territory, capital, and politics. Rather than treating conservation as a neutral or purely technical endeavor, the series foregrounds its contradictions, contested objectives, and material consequences across diverse socio-spatial contexts, ranging from Berlin, Athens, and Zurich to Nairobi. It brings together a range of voices that reflect the multiplicity of conservation practices and collectively engage with their implications.
The program contributes to contemporary conservation discourse and practice by foregrounding new and emerging actors and by reframing conservation as a social practice of repair—one that is historically grounded, politically engaged, and responsive to specific territorial conditions (Bertling 2016; Arch+ 2023).
Realized during Spring 2026, each session will feature a guest speaker, followed by a discussion with invited respondents and the audience.

References
ARCH+. 2023. “The Great Repair: Politics for a Society of Repair.” Special issue, ARCH+ 249.
Bertling, Jürgen, and Claus Leggewie. 2016. “Die Reparaturgesellschaft. Ein Beitrag Zur Großen Transformation?” In Die Welt Reparieren, edited by Andrea Baier, Tom Hansing, Christa Müller, and Karin Werner. Transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839433775-025.
Hall, Stuart. 2023. “Whose Heritage? Un-Settling ‘The Heritage’, Re-Imagining the Post-Nation.” In Whose Heritage? Routledge. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/61147/1/9781000856170.pdf#page=26.
Hertzog, Alice, and Enibokun Uzebu-Imarhiagbe. 2022. “The Paperless Archive. Recasting Benin Collections as a Displaced Archive.” In Thinking about the Archive & Provenance Research, edited by Carl Deußen and Yagmur Karakis. Boasblog Papers 4. Boas blogs. https://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/64500/1/Boasblogs_four-1.pdf.
Jacobs, Justin M. 2024. Plunder?: How Museums Got Their Treasures. Reaktion Books.
Kaika, Maria, Yannis Tzaninis, Tait Mandler, and Roger Keil. 2023. Turning up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency. 1–400.
Laxness, Stefan. 2025. “The Politics of Interdependence in Community-Led Landscape Restoration.” Landscape Research 50(8): 1272–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2025.2516812.
Mbaria, John, and Mordecai Ogada. 2016. The Big Conservation Lie: The Untold Story of Wildlife Conservation in Kenya. Lens & Pens Publishing.
Neumann, Roderick P. 2001. “Africa’s ‘Last Wilderness’: Reordering Space for Political and Economic Control in Colonial Tanzania.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 71(4): 641–65. https://doi.org/10.2307/1161583.
Nyagwalla, Joan Otieno, Vittorio Bellotto, Lawrence Salaon Esho, and Pieter Van den Broeck. 2023. “Conserving the Sacred: Socially Innovative Efforts in the Loita Enaimina Enkiyio Forest in Kenya.” Land 12(9): 1706. https://doi.org/10.3390/land12091706.
Oswalt, Philipp, with Max Czollek. 2023. Bauen am nationalen Haus: Architektur als Identitätspolitik. Berenberg.
Rassool, Ciraj, and Victoria E. Gibbon. 2024. “Restitution versus Repatriation: Terminology and Concepts Matter.” American Journal of Biological Anthropology 184(1): e24889. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.24889.
Sène, Aby L. 2024. “Imperialism Is the Arsonist of Our Forests.” The Republic, February 27. https://rpublc.com/february-march-2024/african-climate-justice-agenda/.