The UCI Humanities Center has received a $25,000 grant award from the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) for a joint project with the Collaborative Media Advocacy Platform (CMAP) in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The grant award will be matched by the Humanities Dean’s Office and the Humanities Center. CMAP is a Nigerian creative, mapping, and advocacy organization with over fifteen years of practice in the Niger Delta.
“Listening to Restoration: Ecoacoustics, Public Art, and Environmental Humanities in the Niger Delta” is grounded in Soundwork: Three Mangroves, an ecoacoustic and public art program led by CMAP at the Ogoni Ramsar Site - a 31,700-hectare mangrove wetland designated a Ramsar Site of International Importance. At its core is a question the humanities are uniquely equipped to address: how can ecological damage and recovery be heard, archived, and movingly communicated to publics who need to understand what is at stake?
Listening to Restoration builds on the concept of collaborative ontologies, developed by Mark LeVine and Lucia Sorbera in partnership with researchers in Port Harcourt and across the African continent. The framework treats the lived practices and knowledge systems of marginalized communities as epistemological foundations for shared inquiry - not data to be extracted, but ways of knowing to be worked with. This means CMAP's Chicoco crews - community media producers who record in creeks, produce radio dramas, make music, and manage sound archives - are knowledge makers whose understanding of the mangrove soundscape is grounded in daily practice. UCI participants contribute humanities methods - historical analysis, ethical inquiry, comparative frameworks, and writing - to a process that is locally directed and collaboratively produced.
Over twelve months, the project will produce a body of collaborative work - essays, audio pieces, a sound installation, a public symposium, and a research pipeline - that demonstrates how humanities methods can deepen, extend, and publicly translate the work of ecological restoration. The centerpiece will be a two-week collaborative residency in Port Harcourt (March 2027), bringing together UCI humanities faculty and graduate students with CMAP's creative team, Chicoco community media producers, University of Port Harcourt researchers, and the communities living with the consequences of oil contamination on their environment. The project not only recognizes the importance of centering communities in the work of environmental remediation, but also amplifies the critical roles of embodied and sensory memories and experiences in the work of environmental restoration.