Kariuki Kirigia, Assistant Professor, School of the Environment, and African Studies Centre was the recipient of the 2023-24 Connaught New Researcher Award for his project Promises of Property: Land Dispossession on an African Indigenous Frontier. The award helps early-career faculty members establish their research programs and increase competitiveness for external funding.
As the largest internal university research funding program in Canada, the Connaught Fund supports the University of Toronto’s graduate students, early-career researchers, interdisciplinary teams, and innovators to meet the challenges facing our global society.
Promises of Property: Land Dispossession on an African Indigenous Frontier focuses on how changing land tenure systems and emerging wildlife conservation initiatives affect and shape land claims, access to land, and land dispossession among the Maasai of Narok County in southern Kenya.
While the Maasai have historically owned land communally, recent expansion of land privatization has largely dismantled collective modes of landownership that have been at the core of pastoralism and wildlife conservation in Kenya’s rangelands. There are increasing cases of the Maasai losing land through the market, facing restricted access to important grazing areas and exclusion from biodiversity conservation initiatives.
“My Connaught research study will investigate the logics and techniques used to dismantle collective land institutions and establish wildlife conservancies to uncover how dispossession occurs within initiatives premised on improving life conditions for humans and wildlife,” said Kirigia.