Interest in cattle: value, risk and security in eastern and southern Africa - Project Launch and Workshop

This project, which will run up to Easter 2026, with Fellows resident in Durham from January to March 2026, takes an innovative approach to questions of value and well-being in eastern and southern Africa. It will bring together scholars from diverse disciplines - from public health to history and anthropology, all of whom share an interest in cattle. Cattle, we suggest, lie at the intersection of multiple, distributed, strategies for securing the future. They are an everyday resource in livelihood strategies; a target of bio-security interventions informed by contemporary One Health approaches; a way to build and reaffirm horizontal social ties; an investment opportunity for those who seek to accumulate – and they are the centre of an enduring aesthetic which valorises them as things of beauty as well as cultural and economic resources.

The project will enable the development and refinement of a series of questions around these intersecting forms of interest in cattle – and to draw on historical experience as well as contemporary research in producing a series of outputs that will inform current debates, encourage engagement with the complex questions raised by the place of cattle in our more-than-human world, and enable and guide future research on this topic.

More information to follow about the structure of this event soon.